Jelloun, Tahar Ben - Richard Eder (review date 19 October 1995)

Richard Eder (review date 19 October 1995)

SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “A Moroccan Morality Tale—Without a Real Moral to It.” Los Angeles Times (19 October 1995): E4.

[In the following review, Eder describes how Ben Jelloun uses his sense of “social and moral acuteness” to corrupt the protagonist, as well as the readers, of his novel Corruption.]

To show his solidarity with the banned Indonesian writer Pramoedya Toer, Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun has taken both his title and theme from Toer's 1954 novel, Corruption. Such a thing might seem odd in the United States, where plagiarism gets whispered at the drop of a publishing lawyer's retainer. Yet what a dazzlingly free and logical tribute it is.

Already, in a prefatory note disclosing this gesture, Ben Jelloun has managed a novelist's task to let us recognize ourselves, transformed, in a distant world. The remarkable thing about Ben Jelloun's Corruption is how...

[The entire page is 833 words long]

Join eNotes

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

eNotes Pass