Ironically, one of our detectives is not a member of the Parisian literati. His deftly imagined scenarios - informed by an impressive knowledge of the period’s personalities and their ideas - provide an ironic critique of a generation of Gallic intelligentsia. In The Seventh Function, the writer unapologetically toys with the events and personal lives of highbrow “characters” such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Umberto Ecco, Louis Althusser, and Julia Kristeva. Its storyline focuses on Operation Anthropoid and the assassination of Nazi official Reinhard Heydrich with Binet’s playful imagination slithering around the boundaries of the historical record. His first novel was the well-received HHhH. By asking who killed Barthes and why, Binet shows us there may be life after the death of the author.īinet is no stranger to manipulating the complexities of the past in his work. Binet takes us on an ambitious international romp through the lives of familiar intellectual personalities (at least to those in academe), while crafting an engaging, funny, and satiric whodunnit. The mortal accident becomes the catalyst for antic fiction in Laurent Binet’s novel The Seventh Function of Language, a detective yarn set in the harum-scarum social scene of French literary theory, philosophy, and politics. On February 25, 1980, one of the world’s most revered literary critics, Roland Barthes, was struck down in the streets of Paris by a laundry van.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 359 pages, $27. Translated from the French by Sam Taylor. The Seventh Function of Language by Laurent Binet. Laurent Binet’s entertaining detective yarn is set in the harum-scarum social scene of French literary theory, philosophy, and politics.
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