The Seventh Function of Language

Starred review from June 19, 2017
Binet, author of the Prix Goncourt–winning HHhH, ups the metafictional ante with The Seventh Function of Language, which draws a detective story out of the true details surrounding the death of French philosopher Roland Barthes. Barthes was the father of semiotics, “a science that studies the life of signs within society,” and this novel is alive with the potential signifiers lurking behind language. And so the fact that Barthes had just had lunch with François Mitterrand—the man who would become the president of France—on Feb. 25, 1985, before being fatally struck by a van becomes grounds for a grand conspiracy. Our hardboiled hero is superintendent Jacques Bayard, who is bewildered by the luminaries of the left that make up his suspects—including Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Gilles Deleuze, Jacques Derrida, and Judith Butler—even as their antic discourse regarding everything from James Bond to LSD (which Foucault tries during a disastrous bondage club visit) make the novel a charming roman à clef like no other. Bayard eventually learns that Barthes may have been killed for possessing a manuscript that reveals the fabled seventh function of language (linguist Roman Jakobson outlined only six), but the mystery—which parodies The Da Vinci Code—is really just an excuse for this loving inquiry into 20th-century intellectual history that seamlessly folds historical moments, such as Louis Althusser’s murder of his wife and the prison death of Antonio Gramsci, into a brilliant illustration of the possibilities left to the modern novel.

This "Dan Brown style" thriller is delivered with a decided wink. On the straight merits of narration, the audio shines. A graduate student in semiology is commandeered by a police inspector to assist in an international investigation. A professor who may have discovered how to control others through language has been murdered. Narrator Bronson Pinchot revels in the novel's absurdist mix. In one memorable scene, his characters deliver esoteric exposition against the increasingly disruptive backdrop of other characters who are engaged in less academic activities. Not all of author Laurent Binet's in-jokes need be understood to enjoy the story. However, Binet does make SO many references--academic, historical, political, and cultural--that some listeners may wish they could refer to the text, the better to google them. K.W. � AudioFile 2017, Portland, Maine