the 7th function of language by laurent binet

Valéry Giscard d’Estaing, the conservative President seeking re-election the following May, found out about the luncheon and grew concerned that there might have been a dastardly plot hatched by those lefties to unseat him. When he was trying to cross the Rue des Écoles, Barthes was on his way back from lunch with Mitterrand in the politician’s apartment in the Marais. So when Superintendent Jacques Bayard of the police intelligence service is instructed to investigate the accident, he is initially puzzled why he is required to look into such a seemingly open-and-shut case.

The accident in front of the Collège de France might have been no more than an unfortunate incident, noted in the statistics of France’s annual road toll and forgotten. What Mitterrand’s rise to power had to do with a seemingly banal accident on the Rue des Écoles occupies the bulk of this brilliantly preposterous novel, an erudite The Da Vinci Code, if you like, with this difference: Binet knows how to write. His second novel focusses on the year leading up to the election of François Mitterrand in May 1981 as the first Socialist President of France’s Fifth Republic. Two years later Binet published a journal he kept during François Hollande’s presidential campaign. HHhH is a profoundly eccentric account of the assassination in 1942 of Reinhard Heydrich, known as ‘Himmler’s Brain’ and the ‘Butcher of Prague’. In this outrageously extravagant novel, Laurent Binet spins an elaborate fable about the circumstances of the death of the author of Mythologies and Writing Degree Zero.īinet, who was born in 1972, shot to prominence in 2010 when his novel HHhH won the Prix Goncourt for a first novel.

Accordingly, the authorities decided that no further investigation was required. He died in hospital one month later of pulmonary complications which may have been triggered by the accident, although no clear evidence of a link was found. On the afternoon of 25 February 1980, Roland Barthes was run over by a delivery van in the Rue des Écoles in Paris, just in front of an extraordinary institution, the Collège the France, a place where luminaries like Barthes deliver lectures to the world at large on all manner of recondite topics, free of cost.

The 7th function of language by laurent binet