Jean-Christophe Rufin. Globalia (Book Review‪)‬

Jean-Christophe Rufin. Globalia. Paris: Gallimard, 2004. 508 pp. 21.00 [euro] A well-established author of travel fiction and clash-of-civilizations romances, French writer Jean-Christophe Rufin tries his hand at dystopia in his latest novel, Globalia. Set in a time centuries ahead of ours, Globalian society is premised on radical standardization of thought and language. The colonial past of French, no less than its present, regulated as it stands by stiff-necked policies, could have certainly assisted Rufin's imagination. Instead, he prefers to model Globalia's linguistic totalitarianism on the current totalizing thrust of American English. His other inspiration is the twentieth century dystopian tradition of Zamyatin, Orwell, and Huxley. Recycling famous places from We, 1984, and Brave New World, Rufin unfolds a political space of ultimate uniformity and conformity with language as both vehicle and metaphor of a sameness-to-come whose seeds are being currently sown by United States-spearheaded global society.