SOURCE: Mortimer, Mildred. Review of Jour de silence à Tanger, by Tahar Ben Jelloun. World Literature Today 65, no. 1 (winter 1991): 173-74.

In the following review, Mortimer discusses how Ben Jelloun utilizes the character of the ailing patriarch in Jour de silence à Tanger to create a “sober and poetic text of introspection and retrospection.”

The patriarch looms large in Francophone Maghrebian fiction. Evoking the anger and resentment of Driss Chraïbi (Le passé simple) and Rachid Boudjedra (La répudiation), he is portrayed with compassion and comprehension by Tahar Ben Jelloun in the Moroccan novelist's most recent work, Jour de silence à Tanger, a novel he dedicates to his own father.

Unlike Chraïbi and Boudjedra, Ben Jelloun focuses neither upon the abuse of power within patriarchal society nor upon a son's challenge to patriarchal order. His protagonist, an aged patriarch, wages a war against time, a battle that he knows he...