The Samurai: A Novel
About this ebook
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.
About the author
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.