Binet

Motivated by the dying word - echo!- of the young male prostitute to whom Roland Barthes entrusted w the text of his vanished final essay - the eponymous Seventh Function of Language - police inspector Bayard and his "interpreter" Simon Bayard a semiotics prof at a leftist Paris university head for Bologna to get the info from not echo but Umberto Eco. We really don't know or understand yet why various dark forces including Bulgarian and soviet agents are interested in Barthes's theory- but it may be just the classic Hitchcock "maguffin" that sets the plot in motion. In bologna Bayard and herzog find themselves at a meeting of the logic committee (they'd been to a Paris meeting earlier) where the audience watched one on one debates on various political esoterica - w the loser holding forth his or her hand to have a digit lopped off! What the hell? This weirdness must be a sendup of some European group or cult - tho the reference eludes me and I would suspect most American readers as well. Author Laurent Binet raises the stakes by having one of the combatants be Antonioni - why I'm not sure but it goes along w the many send ups and takedowns throughout this novel - one for which the standard disclaimer ... any resemblance between the persons in this novel and real people etc ... would be ridiculous and totally against the point.

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