SOURCE: A review of Remembering Babylon, in Boston Review, Vol. XIX, No. 1, February-March, 1994, pp. 32, 34.

[Blume is an American novelist. In the following, he offers praise for Remembering Babylon, comparing the novel to Joseph Conrad's novella Heart of Darkness (1902).]

There is an area forever associated with Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, an area of meeting, crossover, mixture, transgression, an area inhabited—incarnated—by Kurtz. Kurtz is the renegade, the one who has abandoned western identity to assume unspeakable powers in an African forest hidden almost entirely from view of Belgium's river steamers. When Kurtz returns to, or is retrieved by, the West, it is only to rave eloquently and die. He never explains the mystery; he is the mystery. He can't articulate the taboo; he is the interdiction itself, the broken commandment, in his very being. The tablets of the law are shattered on the golden calf. Out of...