[In the following review, Talbot argues that the characters in La Ronde complement the characters found in Le Clézio's Mondo et autres histoires.]

Le Clézio previous collection of short stories, Mondo et autres histoires (1978), celebrated the attainment of a fresh intimacy with the universe by children who were able to bypass the confining world of modern urban life (see WLT 53:2, p. 249), but his latest collection, La Ronde, features characters whose efforts to escape lead only to defeat. The tone is set by the first story, “La Ronde,” a tale of a brief escapade on a motorcycle which ends in tragedy for a teenage girl. The attempts on the part of the central characters in the remaining stories to break out of their confines are similarly frustrated. A fearful, impoverished woman has to give birth unassisted in an overheated mobile home; an escaped convict is retaken after a painful ordeal; a young girl is gang-raped in a low-income housing development; a carefree trip to Italy ends in illness and arrest; a Yugoslav sacrifices everything to enter France illegally only to suffer exploitation there; a Portuguese immigrant has turned to theft to feed his family; a nine-year-old boy's search for his brother leads to crime. Le Clézio has labeled these stories as faits divers—that is, minor news items—and it is easy to imagine them as brief items in a newspaper or newscast, incidents of a kind so common as to become banal. But therein lies the irony: the fait divers are neither minor nor banal when experienced by these characters, who, from Le Clézio's gentle and sensitive perspective, deserve better than to suffer in solitude and whose ill-considered attempts to escape render all the more poignant their hopeless situations.

La Ronde, then, which at first seems to be in contradiction to Mondo, appears to be its complement. The sense of belonging to the universe that the characters of Mondo possess is possible only because they are unfettered by the constraints of civilization. The characters in La Ronde never approach any intimacy with the universe because, for all their attempts, they are unable to escape the harshness of contemporary life. Ariane, the young girl who is raped, lives in a neighborhood in which, Le Clézio tells us, there are no birds, grasshoppers or even flies. The smell of the nearby crematorium reminds us that both man and nature are dead in a civilization surrounded by concrete. It is no coincidence that Milosz, the illegal alien, works as a semi-slave in a cement quarry, for cement is the omnipresent sign of a Western civilization whose growth, characterized by parking lots, expressways and oversize apartment buildings, entails a diminishing of all that is human. La Ronde thereby takes its place as part of Le Clézio's continuing reflection on the alienating forces of the post-industrial world.