In [Die Stimmen von Marrakesch (The Voices of Marrakesh)] Mr. Canetti appears as a traveller, and one would expect this traveller to combine the anthropological preoccupations of the author of Masse und Macht with the literary sophistication of Die Blendung. Yet he has written the straightest of travelogues, whose very virtue lies in the absence of theoretical disquisition, stylistic bravado or any other accretion that might have made this book a contribution either to science or to fiction.

Each of the short sections that make up the book concentrates on a particular aspect or experience of the Moroccan city which the author visited in 1954; each makes its impact by the vivid and direct rendering of things observed and heard—of camels and donkeys, streets and houses, men, women and children, beggars, merchants and artisans, Arabs, Berbers and Jews. The observer's and narrator's responses are part of the account...