Writing Below The Belt

In His Farcical Detective Novel, the Seventh Function of Language, Laurent Binet Takes a Poke at Intellectuals, With Withering Results

- Tobias Grey

LAURENT BINET describes the 10 years he spent researching and writing his first novel, HHhH, about the assassination of Nazi leader Reinhard Heydrich, as “a neurotic search for the truth.” The 45-year-old French author’s second novel, The Seventh Function of Language, completed in half the time, has a more slippery grasp of reality.

Binet developed a passion for the French literary theorist Roland Barthes when he was a high school literature teacher. (Barthes’s wide-ranging and influential criticism contributed to, among other fields, semiotics and structuralism.) In March 1980, Barthes was hit by a laundry van as he was walking home in Paris; he died a month later due to his injuries. It was an accident, but Binet began to spin a story in which the death was a targeted assassination. What could the motive have been? “I thought that it could be about language,” says Binet, but “it also needed to be about power, so why not make the motive the power of language?”