SOURCE: “Borges in Tahar Ben Jelloun's L'Enfant de sable: Beyond Intertextuality,” in The French Review, Vol. LXVII, No. 2, December, 1993, pp. 291-99.

In the following essay, Fayad examines Borges's influence on Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun's novel L'Enfant de sable, in which Borges appears as a character.

Moroccan writer Tahar Ben Jelloun's L'Enfant de sable is, if not a fantastic tale, at least a highly enigmatic novel.¹ In it we are confronted with the confused and confusing identities of the hero/heroine, those of the storytellers, and the subsequent variety and ambiguity in endings given by those multiple storytellers. In certain parts of the novel one no longer knows whether the storyteller is reading from a diary or pretending that he is; sometimes we wonder whether the storyteller and the hero/heroine are one and the same (in the case of Fatouma particularly). Still, in spite of the intricacies...