From the Bookshelf of The Roundtable…

The Seventh Function of Language

Laurent Binet,

Sam Taylor (Translator)

Start date: July 1, 2025

Finish date: August 15, 2025

Discussion: 2025 Tournament

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Showing 2 of 15 topics — 355 comments total

2025 Tournament

Round E voting - 15 September
By Henk · 11 posts · 12 views

last updated 23 hours, 38 min ago

Round E - 1 August - 15 September - Reservoir 13 vs Klara and the Sun vs Headshot
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last updated Sep 09, 2025 10:49PM

What Members Thought

Apr 04, 2018 Viv JM rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: z2018-author-male, fiction-literary, in-translation, read-in-2018, humour, fiction-historical, author-male, thriller

Well, that was an unexpected delight!

I can't say I would ever have chosen to read this book, had it not been longlisted for the Man Booker International Prize (and been the only book from the said longlist stocked by my local bookshop). From the blurb I had imagined it would be rather pretentious and self congratulatory and whilst, there was occasionally an element of the latter, overall I found it jolly good fun. I loved the evolving relationship between Bayard and his sidekick Simon. I loved t ...more

33 likes · Like · see review

Jul 21, 2025 Henk rated it liked it

My first Binet! This was a romp combining a spy thriller plot with secret societies with metaphysical reflections on the power of words over the sword. Not 100% successful but definitely propulsive and an interesting and surprisingly fun read.
What would I do if I was in a novel?

Featuring Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, Derrida and the (would-be) President of the French Republic, The Seventh Function of Language is a wild book that is uneven at times. Strap-ons, illuminati like sects, train station My first Binet! This was a romp combining a spy thriller plot with secret societies with metaphysical reflections on the power of words over the sword. Not 100% successful but definitely propulsive and an interesting and surprisingly fun read.
What would I do if I was in a novel?

Featuring Umberto Eco, Michel Foucault, Derrida and the (would-be) President of the French Republic, The Seventh Function of Language is a wild book that is uneven at times. Strap-ons, illuminati like sects, train stations being bombed and people being killed by poisoned umbrellas, there is a lot going on.
Starting of with a literal car crash, Laurent Binet already very soon breaks the fourth wall: I wish Anthony Hopkins would reread this passage for us
Roland Barthes is a literary critic dies after a lunch with Francois Mitterand, the socialist presidential candidate. Umberto Eco comes back a lot in the first chapters already and the body identified by Michel Foucault, who later is sucked off in a gay sauna. There are 104 chapters which very often are very funny, with even the president of the republic getting involved.
And then there are two mysterious figures in a black DS, secrets agents from Bulgaria, the KGB and Japan, with some people even tortured to death. Overall, this gives me Kurt Vonnegut Jr. vibes in terms of absurdity, and Foucault’s Pendulum by Umberto Eco, with the whole Logos club, and underground debating cult, where the price of failure is paid in bodyparts. Train stations are being blown up, there are orgies (think of Eyes Wide Shut), rituals on a cemetery slab and the bitchiness and petty absurdity of academia. All this plays out against the political fight between Francois Mitterand and Valerie Giscard d’Estaing. Meanwhile our main character Simone starts getting clues that he is actually a main character in a novel. This novel is far from perfect, this nastiness at the end in Murano is insane, including castration and cutting off a hand is so over the top, but I love the rollocking energy and humour, while never backing down from intellectual meta topics.

Quotes and thoughts:
What we steal is worth twice as much as what we earn through hard work

Platitudes of obituaries

Compromise leads to compromised principles.

Obviously this is not a historical novel but a fantasy novel

Magic or incantatory version of language, when word is action, like I sentence you or proclaim you married

All use of words in as much as it is writing is a language of fear

As Spinoza said: Each negation is a definition

Essentially his speech says Fuck Derida

I think I am trapped in a fucking novel

Saying is doing
How to do stuff by talking

The accident is never an accident

The novel is a death

Paris, Bologna, Ithaca, Venice

You’re French people are so dialectical

Reenactment of the battle of Lepanto, where Cervantes is injured

There are some that went to search for unicorns and only found rhinoceroses

Simone thinks: This is not a Sherlock Holmes story

Art is the seed of god

Game of words to the extreme

What is reality for you?

A ranking of French intellectuals in the newspaper, can you imagine

You are governing so you are responsible

You looked like a hippie virgin

LOL, link to Obama later on

He is getting tired of symbols ...more

23 likes · Like · see review

Apr 01, 2017 Gill rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: netgalley

'The 7th Function of Language' by Laurent Binet (translated by Sam Taylor)

3.5 stars/ 7 out of 10

I was interested in reading 'The 7th Function of Language', because I have read and enjoyed Laurent Binet's earlier novel 'HhHH'.

This novel covers very different ground. It opens with an apposite quotation from Jacques Derrida concerning language and interpretation. It then proceeds into a 'detective novel' with a twist; in that many of the people important to its plot are figures from 1980s French po ...more

6 likes · Like · see review

Jul 20, 2025 Irene rated it liked it

This is a novel about a novel in which characters are mutilated and murdered in a world of deadly linguistic games and linguistic arguments. This was probably a very clever book, but I did not grasp most of what was going on.

2 likes · Like · see review

Jul 28, 2025 Pamela rated it really liked it · review of another edition

This was great fun, a kind of quirky literary thriller peopled with the leading lights of 1980s literary/critical theory and French politicians. It mixes up real life events - beginning with the death of Roland Barthes in a Paris street - and speculative fiction. What if Barthes’ death wasn’t an accident but was linked to a powerful linguistic document that could influence anyone in the world to do anything?

I feel it would definitely help to have an interest in the work of intellectuals such as ...more

1 like · Like · see review