SOURCE: Hussein, Aamer. “The Seller of Jellabas.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4603 (21 June 1991): 21.

In the following review, Hussein asserts that Ben Jelloun uses a compressed prose style and structure to focus on an individual mind in Silent Day in Tangier.

Tahar Ben Jelloun is a novelist, poet and critic; an expatriate Moroccan who has spent most of his adult life in Paris, he writes in French, but the landscape of his imagination is North African. He has also written a doctoral thesis on mental disorders among North African migrants in France. His work in all genres reflects these multiple perspectives: his terrain is that of the dispossessed, his characters exiled from family, gender, tribe or nation.

His reputation outside the francophone world is largely based on two interlocking narratives of the fantastic, The Sand Child and the Goncourt prize-winning The Sacred Night, which have earned him the inevitable comparisons...