A great sendup of French intellectual thought - in a mystery novel

Laurent Binet's novel The Seventh Function of Language is completely strange and surprisingly funny myster novel in way that only a French novelist could conceive and bring off, and equally surprisingly the novel is far more appealing and accessible that it sounds. Essentially, Binet takes the death of the French literary and cultural critic Roland Barthes - killed when hit by a van while he was crossing a street in Paris in 1980 - and imagines the death of Barthes may have been a criminal act rather than an accident. Suspecting that Barthes had numerous enemies in part because of his ties to a leftist candidate for PM, Binet sets a police detective off in search of clues about the possible political assassination. The detective, an ordinary non-intellectual officer, Bayard, is completely puzzled by RB and his philosophy and his entourage so he enlists another, younger, less prestigious professor of semiotics, Herzog (name not chose by chance) from one of the most far-left Paris university campuses to aid him in his search, and that's where it gets funny. The two guys are from such different worlds that they can barely communicate, but Bayard appreciates H's ability to read or decode "signs," e.g., in one funny scene H figures out what is contained in some boxes in the PM's office and he explains how he "decoded" the signs to get the answer - all are impressed. There are about a 1,000 Paris-intellectual-political in jokes, and no American reader can get them all, but we can get the drift, and above all it's a great academic satire - with all or at least almost all the bit characters being actual French intellectuals and politicians of the time (wonder if any libel suits are in the works). So far, a great read, tres asmusements.

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