SOURCE: Fayad, Marie. “Borges in Tahar Ben Jelloun's L'Enfant de sable: Beyond Intertextuality.” French Review 67, no. 2 (December 1993): 291-99.

In the following essay, Fayad traces the influence of Argentinian author Jorge-Luis Borges in Ben Jelloun's L'Enfant de sable and argues that the novel's “blind troubadour” character is modelled after Borges.

Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun's L'Enfant de sable is, if not a fantastic tale, at least a highly enigmatic novel.¹ In it we are confronted with the confused and confusing identities of the hero/heroine, those of the storytellers, and the subsequent variety and ambiguity in endings given by those multiple storytellers. In certain parts of the novel one no longer knows whether the storyteller is reading from a diary or pretending that he is; sometimes we wonder whether the storyteller and the hero/heroine are one and the same (in the case of Fatouma particularly). Still, in spite...