[Yates is an American educator, editor, translator, and critic, specializing in Spanish literature. In the following review, he appraises the English translation of Arreola's Confabulario total, noting that the work satirizes “man and his entanglements with logical absurdities.”]

In 1962, Juan José Arreola published in Mexico City his Confabulario total. It was, in a sense, his “Collected Works,” since it brought together most of his short stories, including some of the earliest, which date back to 1941; his latest short sketches or fables (from which the book takes its title); his Bestiario of 1958, a satirical, anti-U.S. play, and all of his most recent prose pieces.

The present translation of Confabulario total, as the newest title in the Texas Pan American Series, confers a certain distinction on the forty-six-year-old author, for probably more of Arreola's over-all literary production is now available in English than of any other Spanish-American writer. The intellectual sophistication and imaginative virtuosity of this collection suggest that he is in many ways worthy of the honor.

The most polished and the most given to verbal and conceptual play of his “generation” of Mexican writers—a group that includes Agustín Yáñez, Juan Rulfo, and poet Octavio Paz—Arreola performs generally in the guise of satirist—a curious type of satirist whose professed pessimism is more cultivated than convincing. The piece that deals with the hyena in his bestiary is a descriptive gem: “The limner boggles and sketches only with difficulty the gross mastiff head, the hints of pig and degenerate tiger, the sloping line of the body, slippery, muscular, dwindling.” But the bite of the final line penetrates only the flesh and not the bone: “He is perhaps the animal that has made the most converts among men.” The observation amuses, as does the previous description of the boa as nothing more than a digestive process.

Arreola's target is man and his entanglements with logical absurdities; but the paradox inevitably interests him more than the plight. “The Switchman,” wherein the fantastic mismanagement and downright arbitrary deceptiveness of an imaginary national railroad system acquires, over the space of a few pages, the stature of a magnificent allegory of the human condition, is possibly his finest short story; it also happens to be one of his gaiest. The originality of Arreola's satire provokes surprise together with delight: he suggest that if all the rich men of the world were to pour their joint wealth into the construction of an inconceivably complicated and expensive machine designed to disintegrate a camel and zip him through the eye of a needle, then they would indeed most likely come to pass through the gates of Heaven.

Arreola shapes up as a better stylist than moralist: beauty of form often eclipses the substance of an idea. Consider the opening lines of his short story “Liberty”:

Today I proclaimed the independence of my acts: Only a few unsatisfied desires and two or three wornout attitudes gathered together at this ceremony. A grandiose proposal that had offered to come sent its humble excuses at the last minute. All took place in a frightful silence.

I believe the error consisted in its noisy proclamation: trumpets and bells, firecrackers, and drums. And to finish off, some ingenious pyrotechnical stunts concerning morality which burned only halfway through.

The excellence of the translation by George D. Schade is evident in these lines. He has done Arreola a humble and faithful service. Schade has taken certain liberties with the organization of the original Confabulario total, some of which he acknowledges. He has mysteriously shuffled a few of the stories about, but has wisely excluded the undistinguished play La hora de todos.

The most disconcerting feature of this book, however, must be charged to Arreola himself, who arranged the contents of the Mexican edition in such a way that his most recent fiction comes first in the book and his earliest, least controlled, and least impressive work appears last.

The reader gets the odd impression that he is witnessing a gifted writer irrevocably and unaccountably losing his touch right before his eyes.