Contemporary Literary Criticism | Jelloun, Tahar Ben - Danielle Chavy Cooper (review date spring 1993)

Danielle Chavy Cooper (review date spring 1993)

SOURCE: Cooper, Danielle Chavy. Review of L'Ange aveugle, by Tahar Ben Jelloun. World Literature Today 67, no. 2 (spring 1993): 430-31.

[In the following review, Cooper discusses the pervasive power of the mafia in L'Ange aveugle and notes the recurring theme of “victimized childhood” throughout the collection.]

After the 1990 publication of his Jour de silence à Tanger, Tahar Ben Jelloun was invited by the editor of the Neapolitan daily Il Mattino to tour southern Italy, not as a tourist or reporter but as an unbiased outsider and interested observer. The result of that two-month tour in Sicily, Calabria, and the region of Naples is L'Ange aveugle, a collection of fourteen short stories (the first one giving its title to the whole volume). It is a moving and powerful literary creation. For the 1987 Goncourt Prize winner (for La Nuit sacrée),...

Join eNotes

The above is a free excerpt. Get total access to this content with the:

eNotes Pass