SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “A Moroccan Morality Tale—Without a Real Moral to It.” Los Angeles Times (19 October 1995): E4.

In the following review, Eder describes how Ben Jelloun uses his sense of “social and moral acuteness” to corrupt the protagonist, as well as the readers, of his novel Corruption.

To show his solidarity with the banned Indonesian writer Pramoedya Toer, Moroccan Tahar Ben Jelloun has taken both his title and theme from Toer's 1954 novel, Corruption. Such a thing might seem odd in the United States, where plagiarism gets whispered at the drop of a publishing lawyer's retainer. Yet what a dazzlingly free and logical tribute it is.

Already, in a prefatory note disclosing this gesture, Ben Jelloun has managed a novelist's task to let us recognize ourselves, transformed, in a distant world. The remarkable thing about Ben Jelloun's Corruption is how quickly and unexpectedly it does transform us.

Initially...