Intellectual mayhem, courtesy of renowned
psychoanalyst-turned-mysterian Kristeva. Something is rotten in
Santa Varvara, a place with a Greek name and a vaguely Balkan
setting but that's full of French and English and other exotic
types-for "everyone in Santa Varvara," our journalist/sleuth
narrator tells us, "was a foreigner, if not personally then at
least one or two generations back." The killer, who's at work
dispatching members of the New Pantheon, who pledge allegiance to a
certain Reverend Sun, is also a foreigner, a person of firm
convictions: One is that the New Pantheon is a terrorist
enterprise, another is that immigration, legal or no, is the root
of all modern evil. Too bad for the jet-setting scholar Sebastian
Chrest-Jones, who by day is a professor of what might be called
migration studies and who, the hard-hearted terminator called
Number Eight reasons, is a hypocrite for having built an academic
cult around multiculturalism and immigrants' rights. Unbeknown to
most of Santa Varvara, Sebastian-bearing a good Byzantine Greek
name, as do most of the principal figures-is an amateur medievalist
and historical novelist who has been puzzling out the Byzantine
past and has solved a few mysteries along the way. Stephanie
Delacour, our heroine, a journalist with a heart of
tobacco-wreathed gold and a yearning for a decidedly
un-Clouseau-ish old cop named Rilsky, would rather be under the
dome of Hagia Sophia herself: "A foreigner and a woman, I know that
I come from Byzantium, a place that has never existed with any
credible reality except in my soul." Reality can be a brutal place,
though, and in between philosophical meditations on fundamentalism,
immigration, political violence and such, Kristeva (Hannah Arendt,
2001, etc.) has a good time bumping off the deserving, and even a
few innocents, while keeping a taut tale moving along nicely.
Readers will enjoy this concoction, which falls squarely in the
Eco/Perez-Reverte tradition of mystery with a moral. Very well
done. (Kirkus Reviews)
In this absorbing, suspenseful novel Julia Kristeva combines
social satire, medieval history, philosophy, psychoanalytic theory,
and autobiography within a gruesome murder mystery. "Murder in
Byzantium" deftly moves from eleventh-century Europe, wracked by
the turbulence of the First Crusade, to the sun-dappled, cultural
wasteland of present-day Santa Varvara, threatened by religious
cults, gangs, and a serial killer on the loose.
This killer is murdering members of a dubious religious sect,
the New Pantheon, and leaving a mysterious figure eight drawn on
their corpses. Meanwhile, Sebastian Chrest-Jones, a noted professor
of human migrations, clandestinely writing a novel about the
Byzantine princess-historian Anna Comnena, disappears on a quest to
learn more about an ancestor who roamed across Europe to Byzantium
during the First Crusade. Kristeva's recurring characters,
detective Northrop Rilsky and the French journalist Stephanie
Delacour, step in and desperately try to piece together the
two-part mystery in the midst of their unexpected love affair.
In the tradition of Umberto Eco, Susan Sontag, and Ian McEwan,
Kristeva skillfully weaves philosophical and critical ideas into
her fiction. Peering into the mores, obsessions, and excesses of
contemporary society, Kristeva offers an engrossing portrait of
Santa Varvara, a paradoxical place of sunshine and pollution where
skeletons lurk in the closets of politicians and oil company
executives. Her descriptions of the First Crusade and the Byzantine
Empire vividly evoke a distant past while speaking to such
contemporary concerns as immigration, fundamentalism, terrorism,
and the East-West divide. Murder in Byzantium is also the only work
in which Kristeva explores her Bulgarian roots. In the midst of
this rich, multilayered historical novel, Kristeva also presents
three stunning, closely observed, and interlocking portraits of
characters struggling with loss and emptiness in their personal
histories and day-to-day lives.
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