Binet

To give a sense of the weirdness of the plot of Laurent Binet's The Seventh Function of Language - in which it is posited that the famous critic and theorist Roland Barthes does not in a random pedestrian accident but was assassinated by foreign agents (Bulgarian no less)in search of his final essay on the eponymous 7th Function - one of the people whom the French police believe may have received from RB a copy of the final essay was the philosopher Althusser but when A learns that his wife threw out the essay scrap believing it was some junk mail he strangled his wife to death. That seemed such an extreme plot device that I had to look it up and in fact A did strangle his wife to death and was acquitted when judged insane. These french theorists are actually stranger than fiction. We are still, like the police, in the dark however re motive: why would all these agents and assassins be in pursuit of this essay from a writer so esoteric that none but the French intellectuals - if the - can follow his line of thought? In any event the police and others are now focusing on an American intellectual as the possible key to this mystery and are tracking him down at Cornell which is to say they are going to Ithaca, which of course brings along a whole raft of literary allusions. Another note: Binet seems to have fun taking jibes at his fellow pseudo mystery writer modiano by noting a few times that he's not sure of a setting and we the readers can place it anywhere in Paris - laughing in his sleeve no doubt at M w his excruciating attention to specific addresses in obscure Paris neighborhoods.


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