To aid in this jocular cause, he's created a delightful comic foil named Jacques Bayard, a philosophically challenged investigator charged by Giscard (as he's called in the novel) with recovering a document concerning 'a matter of national security' stolen from Barthes immediately after the accident. the novel is a cunning, often hilarious mystery for the Mensa set and fans of Umberto Eco's 'The Name of the Rose' and Tom Stoppard's 'Arcadia.'įew are likely to object to Binet's playful sendups of the abstruse semiologists in The Seventh Function. Although generally hailed as a tour de force, some readers questioned the light approach to the Holocaust and Heydrich - known as the Butcher of Prague, one of the most heinous figures in history.

In Binet's first novel, HHhH, about the assassination of Nazi security chief Reinhard Heydrich by two Czech resistance fighters, he repeatedly interjected his authorial two cents, pointing out where he'd taken liberties with his material. It is also a fantasy that's perhaps less farfetched in France, in that it posits a world in which ideas and the intellectuals who debate them actually hold sway, even in politics - in this case, influencing the election of Francois Mitterand over the incumbent president, Valéry Giscard d'Estaing, in 1981. With a lineup of characters plucked from the heavyweights of 20th century French linguistic and critical theory, including Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault, and a postmodern mashup of texts, facts, and falsities, the novel is a cunning, often hilarious mystery for the Mensa set and fans of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. The Seventh Function of Language spins a wild plot that begins with the (actual) death of literary critic Roland Barthes after being hit by a laundry van in Paris in 1980. Or at least you would like to believe so.' That's how Laurent Binet opens his audacious second novel, an intellectual romp about the many ways language exerts power, particularly in politics and fiction. Your purchase helps support NPR programming. Close overlay Buy Featured Book Title The Seventh Function of Language Author Laurent Binet and Sam Taylor

The seventh function of language