Jelloun, Tahar Ben - Richard Eder (review date 11 April 1991)

Richard Eder (review date 11 April 1991)

SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Death Comes to Rest a Weary Mind.” Los Angeles Times (11 April 1991): E10.

[In the following review, Eder compliments Ben Jelloun's “telling, subtle and occasionally puzzling portrait” of the protagonist in Silent Day in Tangier.]

To be dead is to be cut off from the pleasures, pains, objects, emotions, people, projects and despairs offered by life. Tahar Ben Jelloun, a Moroccan poet and novelist, depicts the fraying of these things—before the final severance—in the mind of a dying 80-year-old [in Silent Day in Tangier].

In dying, the conspicuous features, nose and chin, become sharper and more prominent. Pride, malice and a pitiless wit are the conspicuous energies of Ben Jelloun's retired merchant-tailor in his cold bedroom in Tangier at the end of winter.

His ruminations and memories, voiced now in the first person and now in the third,...

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