Barthes is taken to a hospital, put on a ventilator, and thronged by fans, professors, and fellow intellectuals. But Superintendent Jacques Bayard, a no-nonsense policeman charged with the investigation, senses that there’s something amiss. It is 1980, and Barthes, after leaving a lunch in Paris with French presidential candidate François Mitterand, is hit by a laundry truck and badly injured. Out of this incident, Binet spins a madcap tale of intellectuals run amok that is by turns wildly entertaining, mildly frustrating, and intellectually captivating-and only sometimes faithful to the historical record. What does it mean to recreate history? Can we understand the way historical figures understood things-that is, can we get inside their heads? Can we ever know the truth? In other words, HHhH was as concerned with what it means to tell a story about history as it was with the historical events themselves.īinet’s new book, The Seventh Function of Language, similarly takes its inspiration from a real event: the accident that claimed the life of the semiologist Roland Barthes. The brilliance of the book came from the tension between these perspectives. In the present, the narrator grapples with this story and how best to write it, drawing on books, museums, and other references to recreate it in detail.
In the past, Heydrich rises to power in the Third Reich, committing unspeakable atrocities along the way, while two operatives-the Czech Jan Kubiš and the Slovak Jozef Gabčík-plan to kill him. The novel’s narrative fluctuated between past and present, history and story. Laurent Binet’s first novel, HHhH (short for “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich,” which, translated, means “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”), was a fictional reconstruction of the assassination of the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich.
0 kommentar(er)
