"Original Sin" is a written monologue—partly what is written, partly what is thought while he is writing—by an aging Levantine who runs a sleazy boarding house in Cairo….

An astute craftsman (as those who read "Beneath the Stone" and … "Companions of the Left Hand" know), Mr. Tabori has executed [the design of "Original Sin"] with only a few flaws. In fact, he succeeds in many places where it is quite usual for authors to fail. For example, he avoids the more-sinned-against-than-sinning tone into which the psychoanalytic school, those heirs of mid-Victorian bathos, commonly slither: this novelist is trying to explain it away. Likewise, he avoids the very popular opposite error in which the heirs of the Late Victorian decadents present evil as a kind of baleful jewel and lovingly twist all the circumstances and all the characters into an artful setting for it.

But it must...