Contemporary Literary Criticism | Jelloun, Tahar Ben - Eric Sellin (review date autumn 1998)

Eric Sellin (review date autumn 1998)

SOURCE: Sellin, Eric. Review of La Nuit de l'erreur, by Tahar Ben Jelloun. World Literature Today 72, no. 4 (autumn 1998): 884.

[In the following review, Sellin compliments Ben Jelloun's lyrical prose but argues that La Nuit de l'erreur is too derivative and dependent on the formulaic narrative structure established in the author's earlier works.]

Upon completing my reading of La Nuit de l'erreur, I was reminded of a comment Jean Cocteau once made concerning the work of art, to the effect that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish a building being erected from one being demolished, if one passes quickly and does not look carefully. The reader unfamiliar with Tahar Ben Jelloun's earlier works may be stunned by the virtuosity and poetic style displayed in La Nuit de l'erreur and be swept along by the sheer narrative energy of the text; and even someone familiar with such...

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