SOURCE: Cooper, Danielle Chavy. Review of L'Homme rompu, by Tahar Ben Jelloun. World Literature Today 68, no. 4 (autumn 1994): 865-66.

In the following review, Cooper calls L'Homme rompu a “remarkable novel” and praises the work's suspense, imagery, and narrative structure.

In his prefatory note the Moroccan author Tahar Ben Jelloun states that L'Homme rompu is meant to be a writer-to-writer homage to Pramoedya Ananta Toer, an Indonesian author now living in Jakarta under house arrest and unable to publish. Pramoedya was the author of Corruption, a 1954 novel known in France through Denys Lombard's translation, published by Editions Philippe Picquier. Ben Jelloun in L'Homme rompu, set in his native country, “burglarizes” reality as he did in his 1992 collection of short stories, L'Ange aveugle, set in Italy. L'Homme rompu denounces bribery as a calamitous way of life affecting many countries, North and South alike. It is indeed a universal plague, since “L'...