Their investigations lead them from Paris to Italy to upstate New York in search of Barthes’s murderer and clues to the “magic or incantatory” seventh function of language. The 7th Function of Language follows the Rebus-ish Superintendent Jacques Bayard and his initially reluctant helper, Simon Herzog, a postgraduate student at the University of Vincennes, as they attempt to solve the mystery of Barthes’s death. Binet’s novel imagines that the death of the author of The Death of the Author was not an accident but an intricately plotted assassination, weaving around it a story of professional rivalry, political intrigue and lashings of critical theory. Barthes, perhaps the greatest of the critical theorists whose work came to dominate postwar cultural discourse, died from injuries sustained when he was hit by a laundry van in February 1980. It is as erudite and readable as its predecessor, although this time, instead of having as its raison d’être the scrupulous rendering of historical fact, it uses a single event – the death of the critic Roland Barthes – as the springboard for a wildly inventive and engaging tale of scholars, spies and secret societies. Binet’s follow-up, The 7th Function of Language, also superbly translated by Sam Taylor, is another historical thriller.
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