SOURCE: “Mexican Fabulist at Play,” in Christian Science Monitor, July 16, 1964, p. 5.

In the following review, Maddocks argues that while Arreola's satire is clever, the author is at his best when he grapples with the inherent contradictions of life.

The fable is the most charming form that moralizers have invented. Aesop—nourished by experience, stuffed with prudence, paunchy from common sense—would be quite intolerable in any other literary shape.

The fable is for extremists: for those, like Aesop, who are very sure of what they believe—and for those who are very unsure. In this century writers as different as Thurber and Kafka have developed a kind of dark parody of the fable, a sort of antifable. On its shallower levels it is cynical, bitter, given to facile inversions of conventional morality: the gay grasshoppers survive; it is the industrious ants who go under.

But at deeper levels...