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 instantly recognize
finely sketched and often searing portraits of some of this
century's most influential minds: 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. Kristeva's contributions to psychoanalysis,
semiotics, and literary theory have earned her widespread
international acclaim. Already published to positive reviews in
France, 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 themanifold
psychological entanglements of the Left Bank intellectuals. The
result is a novel that will enhance Kristeva's stature as one of
our most versatile and creative thinkers.
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