[In the following review, Hussein asserts that Ben Jelloun uses a compressed prose style and structure to focus on an individual mind in Silent Day in Tangier.]

Tahar Ben Jelloun is a novelist, poet and critic; an expatriate Moroccan who has spent most of his adult life in Paris, he writes in French, but the landscape of his imagination is North African. He has also written a doctoral thesis on mental disorders among North African migrants in France. His work in all genres reflects these multiple perspectives: his terrain is that of the dispossessed, his characters exiled from family, gender, tribe or nation.

His reputation outside the francophone world is largely based on two interlocking narratives of the fantastic, The Sand Child and the Goncourt prize-winning The Sacred Night, which have earned him the inevitable comparisons with Márquez, Borges and Rushdie. The distinctive feature of his work is a consuming obsession with language: dense with allusion, metaphor and echoes of his native Arabic, his texts are deeply inscribed with his migrant sensibility and the experience of his double heritage.

His latest novel, Silent Day in Tangier, may come as something of a surprise to his admirers: the carnivalesque backdrop of his most celebrated fictions is here replaced by the chaotic setting of contemporary urban Morocco, and the central figure, in contrast to the exotic and visionary man-woman Zahra, is an ageing, embittered seller of jellabas. In his exploration of an isolated mind, Ben Jelloun approaches territory more readily identified with Beckett or Handke than with the stalwarts of magical realism however, the novel is linked to his earlier, work by its alternately startling and subtle use of imagery. In an earlier novel, Solitaire, Ben Jelloun similarly focused on a single central figure, an isolated migrant worker in France, but in this brief work he employs an entirely different method. Whereas in Solitaire he experimented with fragmented narrative and a subjective, erotic lyricism, in Silent Day in Tangier he displays a mastery of compression in style and structure.

His impersonation of the old man's voice alternates between a modified third-person stream of consciousness and first-person monologues. Only the odd authorial interjection or explanatory gesture mar the narrative flow, which signals its subject's contradictions: misogyny and sexual adventure, the memory of love, misanthropy, friendship, trust, abandonment and loss. The old man's consciousness is a screen on which deftly juxtaposed images are projected: the swirl of a society in flux, homespun reflections on religion, philosophy and life, the decay of home and city that mirror his inner disintegration. Ben Jelloun adroitly sidesteps the expatriate's dilemma by reducing social comment to an impressionistic trace; several decades of Morocco's history are evoked in a telling phrase, entire biographies inscribed in a sentence.

But this is no essay in documentary realism, no attempt to describe, denounce or explain a specifically Moroccan reality. Ben Jelloun's main concern is the passing of time, the nature of memory, and their link with the redemptive imagination. His central figure's regrets are not for a life unlived but for happiness glimpsed, taken for granted or lost, opportunities experienced and betrayed. The present is the location of bitterness, despair, social anarchy, the loss of valued traditions, physical decay; the past, the realm of pleasure and beauty. Life itself is the adversary; the vagaries of history and politics are subsumed by the brute metaphysic of the real.

Ben Jelloun's genius lies in evoking through language the grammar of existence, and the possibility of transforming with words the grimness of life's narratives. The hostile east wind that plagues the old jellaba seller is also the gentle wind that caresses his face; it is, in conclusion, only a matter of shifting adjectives.