SOURCE: Campbell, James. “Bringing the Bizarre.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4785 (16 December 1994): 22.

In the following review, Campbell criticizes State of Absence for its series of “flimsy anecdotes” and complains that the book suffers from a poor translation.

Tahar Ben Jelloun is a Moroccan Arab who writes in French, and discussion of his work is often couched in exotic terms: he is a “traditional storyteller”, the author of “tales” rather than novels, the creator of events which “shift magically like the sands”, the writer, even, of “the most lyrical prose being produced in Europe”. In fact, Ben Jelloun—winner of the Prix Goncourt in 1987—is capable of producing a concrete, feet-on-the-ground prose, as in Jour de silence à Tanger (1989, published in translation in 1991), in which an aged djellaba-seller looks back over his life from a self-constructed prison of impatience, misogyny and suspicion. Its lengthy monologues and unsparing reflections recall no one...