"The Seventh Function of Language" by Laurent Binet

 

 I was very impressed by the Laurent Binet book I have noted earlier--the one that dealt with the assassination of Heydrich in Prague during the German occupation. And so I was anxious to read another novel by Binet, the title of which heads this post.
 
 A headline of a Guardian review read as follows: "A Postmodern Buddy-Cop Novel Sends up the World of Semiotics."


Yes...that sums it up...
      It starts with the death of Roland Barthes, the French semiologist, who was hit by a truck on a street in Paris after a meeting with Mitterand and died a month or so later. It seemed that Barthes had discovered a seventh function of language--semiologists had up to then recognized only six functions of language--and this seventh function seemed to have almost magical properties of great value. The detective assigned to investigate the murder and his young "buddy," a junior lecturer in linguistics, travel widely in search of the murderer and attempt to solve the mystery of the seventh function. This search, from country to country, involves a whole panoply of real-life, and sometimes fictional, characters that stretches across every French intellectual you can ever think of (especially those involved with language), many French politicians from Giscard D'Estaing to Mitterand, and in the later stages, at a conference at Cornell University, a whole range of public intellectuals, from a young Camille Paglia to Noam Chomsky. For some of these characters--Kristeva, Foucault--we also have intimate insights into their sex-lives. And there is a fair amount of explicit sex (gay and hetero) as the detective and his young buddy go about their travels
      The novel is 359 pages, and I was faltering in my ability to stick with it--entertaining though it was--and I abandoned it about 100 pages from the end. If you should happen to be closely interested in semiotics, then this book is worth trying. Good luck...