Among the authors discussed thus far, perhaps none proves better equipped to counter those alienating effects of accelerated globalization that have been the subject of this book than Jean Rolin. From the dangerous megalomaniacal (or paranoid) jouissance delivered by stagings of globalizing totalities to the feeling that (existential) space has run out in the face of global capital's continued expansion into ever more minute interstices of everyday life, such effects are confronted and refreshingly—if melancholically, and in the most understated of manners—defied. From the banlieues north of Paris in works such as Zones (1995) and La clôture (2002) to the Persian Gulf in Ormuz, Jean Rolin has an unmatched flair for situating his novels in the midst of the very ‘point[s] of arrival, passage or departure’ of the ‘global flow of commodities and labour’ (Welch, ‘Marc Augé, Jean Rolin and the Mapping of (Non-)Place in Modern France,’ 64), places where ‘le local et le global s’impliquent l’un l’autre, s’expliquent l’un par l’autre’ [the local and the global are mutually implicated, mutually explain one another] (Thibault, ‘Rives et dérives chez Jean Rolin,’ 71). Rolin, the former reporter, physically goes to such locales of heightened geo-cultural flux and wanders their territories to glean the raw material for his novels, revealing, with his acute attention to detail, ‘globalization’ to be no teleological fait accompli but rather a perfectly fragile, highly incomplete, and often humorously awkward process to which the lives and destinies of players of various scale—individuals, nations, transnational corporations—are nevertheless inextricably bound.

If Jean Rolin proves particularly adept in his capacity to ‘dévoiler’ [reveal] in this way ‘l’envers du décor de la modernité’ [the hidden face of modernity's decor] (Thibault, 71), it is not merely by his adroit choice of settings but especially because of idiosynchratic micro- and macro-features of his novels, from sentence-level syntax to narrative structures: a set of practices that, following the obsession of Rolin's narrator in Ormuz for naval warfare, we might refer to as Rolin's authorly asymmetrical tactics: ‘c’est-à-dire—en gros, susceptibles de contourner la supériorité technologique de l’adversaire’ [that is to say, in short, capable of circumventing the technological superiority of the adversary] (Ormuz, 41).