[In the following review, McMurray praises Castellanos's portrayal of women in Album de familia.]

The latest work by Rosario Castellanos [Album de familia], Mexico's leading woman author and presently her country's ambassador to Israel, comprises three short stories and one novelette, all of which portray feminine characters in more or less typical contemporary situations. “Lección de cocina,” the best of the collection, records the interior monologue of a young, career-minded housewife whose thoughts wander in phenomenological patterns as she inadvertently burns a steak she is preparing for her tradition-bound husband. The meat, shrunken and toughened through overexposure to heat, appears to symbolize the couple's marriage which is constantly being eroded by friction and rapidly approaching the inevitable breakdown. Here form and content fuse, the protagonist's fleeting psychic digressions reflecting not only the deterioration of her emotional life but the accelerating momentum of change in the physical and social environment as well.

“Domingo” depicts the sterile, frivolous world of an upperclass woman anticipating her next amorous adventure while giving an informal reception, and “Cabecita blanca” focuses on an aging widow's extreme loneliness, the direct product of an absurdly sheltered and not atypical Latin upbringing. The protagonist of “Album de familia,” the book's most extensive narration, is a renowned poetess who has just returned to her native Mexico after winning an international literary award. Ironically, however, her escape from a hostile environment into the realm of art, instead of liberating her, has driven her to the point of paranoia.

Rosario Castellanos' hallmarks include linguistic precision, psychological penetration, and wry humor. Her vivid portraits of females groping vainly for identity through a maze of crumbling traditions in a male-dominated society dramatize the plight of today's alienated woman and help explain the mounting incidence of communication failures.