SOURCE: Rose, Marilyn Gaddis. Review of Onitsha, by J. M. G. Le Clézio. World Literature Today 66, no. 2 (spring 1992): 304–05.

In the following review of Onitsha, Rose focuses on Le Clézio's interest in non-Western settings.

Once again J. M. G. Le Clézio, a novelist fascinated by the non-Western and an anthropologist respecting the Other, takes readers to a site that destroys Westerners; that is, the site either encourages their most egregious exploitative colonialism or puts them in the thrall of difference. The latter happens when the new non-Western environment casts a spell severing the Westerners from their own kind but keeping a barrier between them and the natives.

In Onitsha the time is the immediate postwar period, and the site is a British sub-Saharan colony about five years from independence movements. Geoffrey Allen, a distribution agent for the United Africa Company, retrieves his Italian wife Marilou and...