The Malta Independent on Sunday
Rondeau thriller receives French Literary Prize
Mecaniques du chaos Author: Daniel Rondeau, Publisher: Grasset (Paris) Extent: 464 pp.
Ex-ambassador of France to Malta, author Daniel Rondeau, was recently honoured with the prestigious Grand Prix du Roman by the esteemed Académie française for his latest novel entitled Mécaniques du chaos. The author’s Grasset publication has been described by critics as a crepuscular fresco in the style of an international thriller.
This fictitious story peers into a world, tight-roping between dirty money and terrorism. Contemporary characters struggle with sacred values and love, often behaving as if they have lost the secrets of life. Committed mistakes at times turn people into strangers, even in their own country. This polyphonic suspenseful account, in the hands of a master writer, weaves its breath-taking path through several Eastern capitals, the Libyan Desert as well as the power corridors of Paris. The page-turner plot also sets Malta as a focal point, with a never-ending spiral of things going wrong.
The plot of Mécaniques du chaos brings us face to face with persons who are torn between their origins and the chaotic violent world we live in, often blurred by fragile frontiers. The narrator, archaeologist Sébastien Grimaud, navigates in a network of various individuals, trying hard to explore the meaning of the present, which we do not seem to recognise anymore.
Academician Marc Lambron, writing in Le Point, highlights Rondeau’s new literary masterpiece as having the precision of a clock’s mechanism. The author dissects the preparatory moves of an Islamic State attack by reciting the human tragedy with sinister revelations. Contrasting characters prop up a biotope, made up, among others, of narcotic traffickers, an ex-mistress of Ghaddafi, a French law-keeper struggling with divorce, a Turkish agent and a young financier.
This French literary prize-winner evokes a thriller that interlaces suspense and adventure between Mediterranean cities which the author often visited, lived in and wrote about in his many polymorphic narratives. In this book, Rondeau chronicles intriguing manoeuvres, conspiracies in neighbouring Mediterranean lands − Egypt, Tunisia and Malta.
The author, with some 30 titles to his name, seems to be quite in charge of all that is happening between the covers of this volume. With a long trail of journalistic years with Libération, l’Observateur, Paris Match, l’Express and Le Monde, the author travels with an investigating eye among the misery, civil wars, migration, corruption and fraud that seem to dominate the current chaos of events.