SOURCE: Eder, Richard. “Death Comes to Rest a Weary Mind.” Los Angeles Times (11 April 1991): E10.

In the following review, Eder compliments Ben Jelloun's “telling, subtle and occasionally puzzling portrait” of the protagonist in Silent Day in Tangier.

To be dead is to be cut off from the pleasures, pains, objects, emotions, people, projects and despairs offered by life. Tahar Ben Jelloun, a Moroccan poet and novelist, depicts the fraying of these things—before the final severance—in the mind of a dying 80-year-old [in Silent Day in Tangier].

In dying, the conspicuous features, nose and chin, become sharper and more prominent. Pride, malice and a pitiless wit are the conspicuous energies of Ben Jelloun's retired merchant-tailor in his cold bedroom in Tangier at the end of winter.

His ruminations and memories, voiced now in the first person and now in the third, are a prose poem of isolation...