Walter Benjamin, the inimitable German Philosopher, died on Wednesday September 25th, 1940. 48-years-old, in a Spanish hotel room, and—for fear of deportation into Nazi care, their camps, and his likely extermination, following years of arduous evasion and exile, alone—it was believed he took his own life by an overdose of morphine, an undisputed theory until 2001. Evidence of a sort was brought forth proposing that, in fact, Benjamin had not killed himself but had been, rather, the victim of Stalinist execution. [1] Quite the novel idea, no?

As French novelist Laurent Binet reminds us, though, in the opening of his new novel, The Seventh Function of Langauge, “Life is not a novel. Or at least you would like to believe so.”

Roland Barthes—French semiotician, writer, critic, the man who did not predict but proclaim his own death in 1967—was struck by a laundry truck on Monday, February 25th, 1980, after lunch with the socialist presidential candidate François Mitterand, and died on Wednesday, March 26th.[2] These facts are verifiable; there were witnesses and timely reports. To indulge the weighty presumption that the laundry truck was ignorant to the writer’s stature and significance, let alone his name, is both fair and safe, albeit both judgments not free of risk, that is to say: what if the driver did know the man in question was Roland Barthes? What would be the implications? What if it was no accident at all but—rather—an assassination? What would one chance in not, here, hunting down the truth like the Gestapo did Jews? This is the terrain—rife with hill, dale, gutter, ditch, cemetery, guard dogs, and pruning shears—upon which Binet’s The Seventh Function of Language dwells; it asks: where, why, and how do we draw the lines of “truth” in literature? and who gets to ink the letters?

In brief: Barthes—who is given no cogent address or edgewise word in the novel; only a momentary, trancelike ejaculation—is struck by the aforementioned laundry truck, and visited by investigator Jacques Bayard, a superintendent with the French Police intelligence service. While his presence there is at first circumstantial and a matter of departmental procedure—probing every nook and cranny of the forthcoming election between candidates François Mitterand and Valéry Giscard—it is soon revealed that something was stolen from Barthes after the hit. What begins as a hunch—“What he saw in Barthes’s eyes: fear”—is confirmed and later clarified: a document entitled “The Seventh Function of Language,” a continuation of Russian linguist Roman Jakobson’s six functions, and believed to be the most powerful of the set, capable of convincing “anyone else to do anything at all in any situation”, was stolen. In its absence, almost no...