Overview

Julia Kristeva's dazzling fictional debut is an intellectual adventure, full of vitality, sensuousness, and sustained lyricism. Reminiscent of The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoir's 1954 masterpiece, The Samurai brilliantly reconstructs a pivotal era of postwar French history-Paris in the late 1960s-and at the same time records the political disillusionment and ferment of a generation. In a brisk narrative spanning three continents, the novel follows an array of passionate and promiscuous intellectual warriors-the ""samurai"" for whom ""writing is the only lasting act of pleasure and war combined."" Readers will recognize finely sketched and often searing portraits of figures such as Lacan, Derrida, Barthes, Althusser, and many others. With an authorial voice that modulates between the erotic and the meditative, the ironic and the rancorous, The Samurai moves from Paris to Mao's China-where revolutionary idealism collides with cold pragmatism-to New York and back to Paris. Over a twenty-five year period, the characters experience countless battles involving love, depression, maternity, and disease, while the various themes of the text-language, prison, madness, emotional ruptures-are brought to fruition with astounding insight. This is a novel whose enormous energy derives from the juxtaposition of vital ideas set on a broad historical canvas. Fluid and captivating, The Samurai brilliantly illuminates both the constantly shifting terrain of human relationships and the manifold psychological entanglements of Left Bank intellectuals.

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Reviews

Both sensual and brilliantly written, this novel is full of ideas and will appeal to thinkers. * Library Journal *

Author Information

Julia Kristeva is professor emerita of linguistics at the Université de Paris VII. A renowned psychoanalyst, philosopher, and linguist, she has written dozens of books spanning semiotics, political theory, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique, as well as several novels and autobiographical works, published in English translation by Columbia University Press. Kristeva was the inaugural recipient of the Holberg International Memorial Prize in 2004 “for innovative explorations of questions on the intersection of language, culture, and literature.” Barbara Bray (1924–2010) was a leading translator of twentieth-century French literature into English, including works by Marguerite Duras, Samuel Beckett, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Anouilh, and Alain Robbe-Grillet.

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