The Seventh Function of Language
This novel is an excellent blend of historical fiction, philosophy, and thriller.
The Seventh Function of Language begins with the mysterious death of French literary critic Roland Barthes in 1980. The novel suggests that Barthes was murdered. A semiotician and a police detective investigate this potential murder. They try to figure out who killed him and his motive. On this journey, they encounter many real historical figures, like Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, François Mitterrand, Jacques Derrida, John Searle, and others.
The novel is full of ideas, it's entertaining, and incredibly smart.
Life is not a novel. Or at least you would like to believe so. Roland Barthes walks up Rue de Bièvre. The greatest literary critic of the twentieth century has every reason to feel anxious and upset. His mother, with whom he had a highly Proustian relationship, is dead. And his course on “The Preparation of the Novel” at the Collège de France is such a conspicuous failure it can no longer be ignored: all year, he has talked to his students about Japanese haikus, photography, the signifier and the signified, Pascalian diversions, café waiters, dressing gowns, and lecture-hall seating—about everything but the novel. And this has been going on for three years. He knows, without a doubt, that the course is simply a delaying tactic designed to push back the moment when he must start a truly literary work, one worthy of the hypersensitive writer lying dormant within him and who, in everyone’s opinion, began to bud in his A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments, which has become a bible for the under-25s. From Sainte-Beuve to Proust, it is time to step up and take the place that awaits him in the literary pantheon. Maman is dead: he has come full circle since Writing Degree Zero. The time has come.
- author: Laurent Binet
- full title: The Seventh Function of Language
- genre: literary fiction
- format/type: bookfiction
- country: France
- topics: #language, #philosophy
- publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
- publish date: August 1, 2017
- pages: 369
Literary Awards:
- Prix Interallié (2015),
- Prix du roman Fnac (2015)
My Rating of the Book:
- content: 💙💙💙💙.5
About the Author:
Laurent Binet was born in Paris, France, in 1972. He is the author the debut novel HHhH, which won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman and was named one of the fifty best books of 2015 by the New York Times. His memoir, La Vie professionnelle de Laurent B., tells of his experience teaching in secondary schools in Paris. He is a professor at the University of Paris III, where he lectures on French literature.
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