SOURCE: Buss, Robin. Review of Étoile errante, by J. M. G. Le Clézio. Times Literary Supplement, no. 4688 (February 1993): 13.

In the following mixed review, Buss praises Le Clézio's development of the two central female characters in Onitsha, but argues that the novel's content is superficial.

The blurb on J. M. G. Le Clézio's new novel says that it forms a pair with Onitsha, published in 1991; but, in reality, the filiation goes further back, to Désert, (1980), in which Lalla, a Moroccan girl, experiences the alienation of the city, conceives a child, loses the father in a banal accident and gives birth after returning to a more natural environment. Esther, the Jewish girl in Étoile errante, follows a comparable odyssey and also gives birth to her child after the violent death of its father. In Onitsha, the young Fintan travels to Africa, to discover an older civilization...