In addition to some challenging thickets of language theory, the novel is packed with drama ― car chases, mutilations, suicide, graphic sex, and multiple murders. "A cunning, often hilarious mystery for the Mensa set and fans of Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose and Tom Stoppard's Arcadia. At its least self-conscious The Seventh Function is maybe also at its most Barthesian." -Nicholas Dames, The New York Times Book Review What works best here is a quality reminiscent of Barthes: the narrative's attentiveness, particularly to sharp details that resist the effort to read them as clues. On its surface a romp, then, a burlesque set in a time when literary theory was at its cultural zenith knowing, antic, amusingly disrespectful and increasingly zany as it goes on. It is as if a roman policier has collided with the kind of campus novel Kingsley Amis would have written had he been of the generation and temperament to read Derrida's Of Grammatology. "No small pleasure is to be had from the amusing, sometimes scabrous, satirical portraiture of illustrious figures.
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