SOURCE: Mortimer, Mildred. Review of So Vast the Prison, by Assia Djebar. World Literature Today 75, nos. 3-4 (summer-autumn 2001): 107.

In the following review, Mortimer notes that So Vast the Prison embodies Djebar's career-long thematic preoccupations, particularly the efforts of Algerian women to free themselves of patriarchal oppression.

So Vast the Prison (orig. Vaste est la prison, 1995) conveys the overarching theme of Assia Djebar's work: Algerian woman's struggle for empowerment in defiance of patriarchal constraints. The Algerian novelist reminds her readers that as French colonialism once sought to stifle voice and memory, denying the colonized the right to their own history, so Maghrebian patriarchy still attempts to restrain Algerian woman's right to circulate freely in public space.

Combining several strands of narrative, the text traces the disintegration of a marriage, recounts the archeological quest for traces of Berber script, and presents biographical fragments of Djebar's maternal lineage. Beginning with a...