SOURCE: A review of Non, in World Literature Today, Vol. 61, No. 2, Spring, 1987, pp. 272-73.

[Dorian is a Romanian-born novelist, poet, and short story writer who now lives in the United States. In the following review, she remarks favorably on Non.]

Surfacing in Marie-France Ionesco's excellent translation half a century after the scandal it caused upon its original publication in Bucharest in 1934, the mélange of literary criticism, texts on Romanian literature and culture, and philosophic and existential notes titled Non is, more than anything else, a contribution to an inquiry into creativity, as we observe the metamorphoses that a writer's themes and motifs undergo with time and in relation to the circumstances of his life. Among writers in exile, displaced and alienated, with their struggle to adjust or resist adjustment and their performance in a foreign language from within a foreign culture, Eugène Ionesco is yet another...