[In the following review, Buss argues that The Sand Child and La Nuit sacrée resist literal interpretations, emphasizing the importance of the “journey” in both works.]

It might be misleading to describe La Nuit sacrée, which won the 1987 Prix Goncourt, as a sequel to The Sand Child, because there is no strict narrative progression from one to the other. But they share a central character whose ambiguous upbringing is the starting-point for both stories. This is the eighth child of a father determined, after seven daughters, to produce a son. “You will be a mother, a true mother”, he told his wife, “you will be a princess, for you will have brought to birth a boy. … It will be named Ahmed—even if it is a girl!”

This child, painfully liberated from the imprisonment of a false identity, emerges to become, by the end The Sand Child, the first-person narrator of her own story, and subsequently of La Nuit sacrée. Neither book is intended to be merely a literal account of an improbable deception. Despite their contemporary Marrakesh setting, they belong to the domain of the traditional story-teller whose tales have the status of myth. The listener can choose to receive them as pure entertainment, as poetry or as metaphors for the individual's struggle against the pressures of convention. On the broadest interpretation, they may be read as political allegories of Maghrebi, Arab and Muslim society.

Ahmed is both deprived and privileged; deprived of her true identity, but privileged to commute between otherwise closed domains through the doors and gates that are a recurrent metaphor in the text. They are also, clearly, sexual. Married, for the sake of appearances, to an epileptic with a limp, the child discovers a sexuality that transcends gender and culture.

In The Sand Child, the secret that the family circle tries to defend from the outside world destroys it, since it is unable to reconcile the contradictions between appearances and reality. La Nuit sacrée leads Ahmed/Zohra through acceptance of her sexuality, then a savage revenge from the past, to a form of sanctity. “Mon histoire n'a ni grandeur ni tragédie”, she states in the preface, announcing the theme of reflection on the nature of the story which is picked up repeatedly as it draws towards its end: “mon histoire était ma prison.” Caught in a body which has been taught to transcend gender, she finds release in her imagination and her secret love for the blind Consul, whose inability to judge by appearances allows him to feel what lies underneath.

The narrative is a journey, starting with Zohra's emancipation by her dying father, on the “sacred night”, the twenty-seventh day of Ramadan, when he re-names her and exhorts her to forget the past. Mystery and ambiguity are part of the story and may be heightened, for the non-Muslim reader, by the sense of distance in space and time. No doubt, the award of the Goncourt was intended partly to draw richly deserved attention to the work of North African writers in French; but The Sand Child and La Nuit sacrée stand on their own merits as hauntingly poetic and original novels.

Solitaire is an early, and more self-consciously “poetic” story of a North African worker in France. Gareth Stanton's introduction tries to outline the political and literary background to Ben Jelloun's work—not an easy task, in seven pages. However, together with these two readable translations, it does provide some signpost to the work of an important writer.