SOURCE: Cooper, Danielle Chavy. Review of L'Ange aveugle, by Tahar Ben Jelloun. World Literature Today 67, no. 2 (spring 1993): 430-31.

In the following review, Cooper discusses the pervasive power of the mafia in L'Ange aveugle and notes the recurring theme of “victimized childhood” throughout the collection.

After the 1990 publication of his Jour de silence à Tanger, Tahar Ben Jelloun was invited by the editor of the Neapolitan daily Il Mattino to tour southern Italy, not as a tourist or reporter but as an unbiased outsider and interested observer. The result of that two-month tour in Sicily, Calabria, and the region of Naples is L'Ange aveugle, a collection of fourteen short stories (the first one giving its title to the whole volume). It is a moving and powerful literary creation. For the 1987 Goncourt Prize winner (for La Nuit sacrée), the primordial task of literature is “burglarizing” reality. The Mezzogiorno tour provided...