But almost-forty me found the whole thing exhausting, a shaggy dog detective story with patches of the whole continental-philosophy-vs-analytical-philosophy debate sewn in with loose stitches. And I’m sure that the twenty-year-old version of me would have flipped out over Binet’s pastiche of postmodern theory and detective pulp fiction. Kristeva! Eco! Derrida! All my childhood heroes are here! Soon Bayard finds himself in search of a lost manuscript by the linguist Roman Jakobson on the mysterious “seventh function of language.” In The Seventh Function of Language, Laurent Binet spins a madcap secret history of the French intelligentsia, starring such luminaries as Jacques Derrida, Umberto Eco, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, and Julia Kristeva – as well as the hapless police detective Jacques Bayard, whose new case will plunge him into the depths of literary theory. But what if it wasn’t an accident at all? What if Barthes was murdered?
The world of letters mourns a tragic accident. The literary critic Roland Barthes dies – struck by a laundry van – after lunch with the presidential candidate François Mitterand.
This is not a review and I am feeling lazy and not especially passionate about the book, so here is the publisher’s-blurb-as-summary: What is the novel about though? you may ask. If it had been six hours I might have loved it. I audited the audiobook (translated by Sam Taylor and read with dry wry humor by Bronson Pinchot). I was especially excited when I learned that The Seventh Function took the death of Roland Barthes as its starting point and post-structuralism in general as its milieu. I was a big a fan of Laurent Binet’s novel HHhH, so I was excited when I heard about his follow up, The Seventh Function of Language.
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