SOURCE: A review of Les cancrelats, in World Literature Today, Vol. 55, No. 4, Autumn, 1981, p. 715.

In the following review, Sellin praises Tchicaya's literary achievement in Les cancrelats.

African fiction of French expression has tended, since the early 1950s, to conform not only to French linguistic stringencies but also to French literary models. The African writer adopted certain forms which conformed to his predilections, notably the diary, the epistolary exchange, the autobiography and the short story or fable.

A new, more boisterous fiction, which made the French language and consequent literary tradition bend to its will rather than vice versa, emerged in the late 1960s with the publication of Ouologuem's irreverent Le devoir de violence and Kourouma's Les Soleils des Indépendances. This free-wheeling assault on the French love of order and conformity—paralleled in North Africa by the writings of Kateb, Boudjedra and Khaïr-Eddine—seemed to herald a...