SOURCE: Buss, Robin. “Ambiguous from Birth.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4478 (27 January-2 February 1989): 88.

In the following review, Buss argues that The Sand Child and La Nuit sacrée resist literal interpretations, emphasizing the importance of the “journey” in both works.

It might be misleading to describe La Nuit sacrée, which won the 1987 Prix Goncourt, as a sequel to The Sand Child, because there is no strict narrative progression from one to the other. But they share a central character whose ambiguous upbringing is the starting-point for both stories. This is the eighth child of a father determined, after seven daughters, to produce a son. “You will be a mother, a true mother”, he told his wife, “you will be a princess, for you will have brought to birth a boy. … It will be named Ahmed—even if it is a girl!”

This child, painfully liberated from the imprisonment...