Overview

This sequel to Julia Kristeva's celebrated allegory The Old Man and the Wolves returns to the corrupt seaside resort of a mythical town, where the boundaries between East and West, civilization and barbarism, and good and evil are erased. Part mystery, part meditation, this engrossing tale features the return of Parisian amateur detective and newspaper reporter Stephanie Delacour (Kristeva's alter ego), drawn into the mystery of a friend's murder. The story opens with the gruesome discovery of the decapitated body of a gifted translator, Gloria Harrison. Delacour finds herself participating in the investigation in the company of Detective Superintendent Northrup Rilsky. As the mystery unfolds, Delacour veers away from Rilsky's investigation, on to a trail that leads to the real killer. Kristeva uses the classic thriller genre to animate the themes that run through her work as a linguist and philosopher. While Stephanie Delacour probes a brilliant gallery of suspects, we read between the lines some of the sorrows and dilemmas that are the focus of Kristeva's own life and work: motherhood and the complex relationship between mother and child; art and music; psychoanalysis; mourning and melancholia; language; the powers of horror; and the hostility aroused by a competent, gifted, and attractive woman who is at once devotedly maternal and capable of sexual passion.

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9780231220880

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Reviews

An intellectual detective story. * New York Times *

An intellectual detective story. * New York Times * Fuses a neatly constructed murder mystery with a series of brief meditations on linguistic and philosophical topics. * Kirkus Reviews * I warmly recommend this experimental novel for its intelligence, interest, thoughtfulness, and capacity to question well-known assumptions and familiar boundaries. * International Journal of Psycho-Analysis *

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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