Most of the time when I “squee,” I do it in my head. But this time it came out. Like a pig. And it was loud.
This year I’ve been making my way through piles of books that I picked off NPR’s most excellent Book Concierge site, and have been relatively happy with my choices. Whether I’m thumbing through trashy bodice rippers, battling Moriarty with Lady Sherlock, or killing my sisters to secure the crown, this year I feel like I’ve been treated to some real mind-bending fiction.
Take my current listen: Bronson Pinchot (sounding quite suave and not at all like Balki Bartokomous) reading French author Laurent Binet’s Seventh Function of Language. Ever wonder what it's like to ride shotgun with a Parisian street cop and his reluctant philosophy-post-grad sidekick while they try to solve the murder of real life critic and semiologist, Roland Barthes? He got hit by a laundry truck in real life, you know. It was considered a great waste when it happened. He had just had lunch with French politician, Francois Mitterand.
Question: You know what he probably didn’t do?
Answer: Any of the other shit in this book.
If I could pick any under-appreciated sub-genre from literature and command more authors to write with it, it’d be fiction with real world people from history doing unreal stuff.
So, it’s delightful to me that The Seventh Function of Language not only creates a fantasy theorem that pretty much guarantees ultimate power to anyone who discovers and wields it, but throws it in the middle of a crazy conspiracy of real (but totally unrelated real-world events) starring the greatest philosophers of the 20th century. Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva, Umberto Eco, John Searles, Jacques Derrida, Francois Mitterand… but also Bulgarian henchmen, Japanese ninjas, Arab jiggalos, a society that chops off the fingers of debate losers, explosions, car chases, and more.
Did I mention that it’s a buddy cop thriller? Yeah. They’re delightfully awkward together. I kind of love them.
If you want to feel nostalgic for overwhelming amounts of literary criticism and/or totally ungrounded metaphorical debate about the connection between symbols and being, redo your English degree or read this book.
Somewhat-related aside: In the genre, I also really enjoyed Matthew Pearl’s sequel to The Dante Club, The Dante Chamber, which somehow managed to take another of Dante’s novels (this time, Puragtorio) and transform it into elaborate crime fiction. It shouldn’t have worked, but it did. Robert Browning and Lord Alfred Tennyson solving gruesome murders? Yes, please!
But did I squee over this? (Honestly, yes. But it wasn’t today.)
Nope. I squee’d over some good old YA.
Birches, we’ve been waiting over a year for this sequel… I read King of Scars in almost one sitting by the pool at Tarranea. If I’m going to close out the Duology the way it needs to be closed out, I’m going to need some help from y’all. We have four months to close out this pandemic, get me an a plane, put a drink in my hand, and get my ass poolside.
Think we can all pull together to make this work? I think we can.
