The seventh function of language Cover Image

Book

The seventh function of language / Laurent Binet ; translated from the French by Sam Taylor.

ISBN: 9780374261566
ISBN: 0374261563
Physical Description: 359 pages ; 22 cm
Edition: First American edition.
Publisher: New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

Binet, Laurent, (author.). Taylor, Sam, 1970- (translator.).

Summary:

Paris, 1980. The literary critic Roland Barthes dies, struck by a laundry van, after lunch with the presidential candidate Francois Mitterrand. The world of letters mourns a tragic accident. But what if it wasn't an accident at all? What if Barthes was ... murdered? Laurent Binet spins a madcap secret history of the French intelligentsia, starring historical luminaries as well as the hard-boiled police detective Jacques Bayard, whose new case will plunge him into the depths of literary theory (starting with Roland Barthes Made Easy). Soon Bayard finds himself partnered with the semiology professor Simon Herzog in a mad search for a lost manuscript by the linguist Roman Jakobson on the mysterious "seventh function of language" in a comedy that takes us from the cafes of Saint-Germain to the corridors of Cornell University, and into the duels and orgies of the Logos Club, a secret philosophical society that dates back to the Roman Empire.