Philosophy and parody in a murder mystery
Laurent Binet's latest novel is at once a lecture, a detective story, and an exploration of the limits of fiction.
In Review
The Seventh Function of Language
A Novel
I wasn’t even a page into this novel when I commented to my husband that I didn’t think I was going to make it through the book. “What do you mean?” he asked. “Isn’t it a novel?” I responded by reading him the opening lines:
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 . . .
“I see what you mean,” said my husband. Yet, I kept reading, lured by the romance of reading a mystery novel that revolves around a semiologist investigating the murder of a literary critic.
