[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 Ben Jelloun masterpieces as La Prière de l'absent (1981), L'Écrivain public (1983), L'Enfant de sable (1985), and La Nuit sacrée (1987) might well, like Cocteau's casual passerby, mistake as vintage Ben Jelloun a text which—even as it does demonstrate the sometimes glib stylistic genius for which the Moroccan novelist is famous—actually fails to constitute a novel (or “house”), settling rather for a construction of short narratives (beams, girders, armatures in an unfinished or partially razed house).

We are told the story of Zina, who is born under a maleficent star: namely, on the same day as that on which her grandfather dies. Zina grows up to experience a horrific series of trials and molestations. Ben Jelloun has, as always, pulled no punches in describing depravity, rape, and violence. Unfortunately, in La Nuit de l'erreur his trademark shifting point of view—which the author normally deals with brilliantly in a clever and involuted manner within a logical frame story—becomes patently disruptive, and Ben Jelloun introduces alternate narrative teams in the guise of itinerant performers and the like, having more or less abandoned Zina short of the requisite number of pages the market might label a “novel.”

This is not the first time Ben Jelloun's work has been subjected to marketing strategies. It is obvious that L'Enfant de sable and La Nuit sacrée were composed as one text of epic proportions (and what a tour de force, indeed), then parceled into two entities which, almost simultaneously with the appearance of the latter, were offered as a boxed duo or bound into one volume; but that was an instance of solid Ben Jelloun being partitioned by publishing desiderata. In La Nuit de l'erreur we find Ben Jelloun apparently pacing himself for a length dictated by these desiderata rather than by the actual fitness of his proposed story.

In sum, we have in La Nuit de l'erreur what we might call self-emulation, or the reprise of a previously successful formula which now only partially succeeds. The fabric of the style is excellent, but the tailoring of the suit is alop; or perhaps we should say: the construction materials are top quality, but the building is unfinished, asymmetrical, and lacking in traditional amenities. Tahar Ben Jelloun is a great writer who has, here, authored a book which is well written but is not on a par with his other works, save at the most basic levels of the sentence and the paragraph.