SOURCE: "Stifled Tiger," in New York Times Book Review, February 4, 1968, pp. 5, 40-1.

In the following review, Gallagher offers a primarily positive assessment of A Change of Skin.

In an interview Carlos Fuentes once said that the Latin-American novel was now firmly out of its epic, Manichean stage. Before World War II, the problems depicted by Latin-American novelists looked relatively straightforward. Primitive men confronted primitive nature; oppressors and oppressed were easy to classify; the struggle between good and evil was a clear one. The postwar generation has delved deeper into the life of the continent, investigating Latin-American history with a greater regard for its complexity.

Fuentes, naturally, concentrated on the complexities of Mexican history. He has been particularly energetic in his denunciation of what seems to him the inauthenticity of Mexico's "institutional" revolution. One oligarchy was exchanged for another; the process could not be reduced to obvious villains and...