Here is an atypical man to say the least, who knows the turnover of his company Altrad, 5.452 billion euros for the financial year 2023-2024, but cannot say his age, between 74 and 76 years. If he cannot celebrate his birthday, this year he will celebrate the 40th anniversary of his world group of industry services (maintenance, nuclear, scaffolding). If I speak to you here of Mohed Altrad, it is because this shock entrepreneur is also a novelist, who publishes these days his fourth fiction, The shared desert (South acts).
But what is a good deal to take the pen a billionaire (name he refutes, “it’s not me, my group is”) to the busy schedule – he is also president of the Montpellier rugby club? The answer, after a long detour by his childhood in the extreme Syrian desert (also reported in his first novel Badawi), revolves around two ideas: revenge, on a deadly father who repudiated his mother, who died very young, and recognition. “When, a scholarship student, I arrived in Montpellier at the end of 1969, I did not know a word of French and in this region where a number of black feet lived, I was a little Arab Arabic. I had no choice: it was, either nothingness, or success. I had to master France, its culture, its language.” Obviously, the arrival was fierce, with his grooved customs officers, and the feeling of abandonment and loneliness never far for the fascinated man by France after having read a portrait of De Gaulle and a novel by Flaubert translated into Arabic.
Three identities
For a long time, Mohed was torn between his three identities, Bedouine, Syrian and French, like his hero, Rihad. We discover this one while he meets, in Dubai, of Nour, a Syrian nurse founding a mission for orphans. The beginning of a complicated love story … Rihad, Nour, two characters that we follow, with flashbacks, the route, sinuous for the first, in the butt in the distrust of the bankers, dark for the second, married to an unavailable individual and who finds himself, in 2015, trapped in Aleppo in the middle of the civil war.
When in 1985 Rihad was denied a loan after buying a bankrupt business, he took over the “motted motto”: “Let’s go! Let us build a city and a tower whose summit touches the sky, and make a name for ourselves.” It is an understatement to say that it will comfort it. Through his creatures of paper, Mohed Altrad does not abandon anything, from his successes as well as his failures (in love, judicial, political), all in travesties, of course, the privilege of the novelist obliges. A franchise all in all very nice.