"Original Sin" is a written monologue—partly what is written, partly what is thought while he is writing—by an aging Levantine who runs a sleazy boarding house in Cairo….

An astute craftsman (as those who read "Beneath the Stone" and … "Companions of the Left Hand" know), Mr. Tabori has executed [the design of "Original Sin"] with only a few flaws. In fact, he succeeds in many places where it is quite usual for authors to fail. For example, he avoids the more-sinned-against-than-sinning tone into which the psychoanalytic school, those heirs of mid-Victorian bathos, commonly slither: this novelist is trying to explain it away. Likewise, he avoids the very popular opposite error in which the heirs of the Late Victorian decadents present evil as a kind of baleful jewel and lovingly twist all the circumstances and all the characters into an artful setting for it.

But it must be said that Mr. Tabori … has been somewhat parsimonious with events. There are enough solid incidents for an active short story; no more than that. The bulk of the book is filled out with little particles of atmosphere … numbingly repeated.

To explore the problem of evil is difficult: it is a problem that has galled the minds of saints and schoolmasters ever since man began to reason about his nature. No one will blame a working novelist for not solving it. But it is too bad that Mr. Tabori chose the documentary method. Telling his story form within a diseased soul, so to speak, may have enabled him to put the question to his readers more terribly than any other way, but it surely made it impossible for him to contribute very much toward an answer. The weakest part of the novel is the last part. And yet the reader must share the blame for this with Mr. Tabori. "Original Sin" leaves its readers, wise in our generation, feeling the incompleteness of our own moral thought.