- Hardcover: 288 pages
- Publisher: Columbia University Press (3 Feb 2006)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0231136366
- ISBN-13: 978-0231136365
- Product Dimensions: 2.4 x 1.6 x 0.2 cm
- Average Customer Review: 2.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 509,969 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Review
"This is a novel of which we have not seen the like since Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose." -- Bernard-Henri Levy, Le Point "Julia Kristeva gives us a stimulating, joyous book. In a word, a great Byzantine novel." -- Christine Rousseau, Le Monde "Readers will enjoy this concoction, which falls squarely in the Eco/Perez-Reverte tradition of mystery with a moral." -- Kirkus "This is no 'novel'...It is inflammatory, argumentative, ranting, full of history, prose suggestion, education... and a relay of truth." -- Tony Gurney, New Criminologist "There are philosophical observations, trenchant comments and deep historical events in this book, but it's also a lot of old-fashioned fun." -- Margaret Cannon, Globe and Mail "It's a book chock-full of ideas and experiments." -- Irish Times "Kristeva doesn't skimp on plot or suspense... Buy it for the Dan Brown fan in your life." -- Matt Thorne, The Independent Online Edition " Murder in Byzantium is an intriguing and bold venture... A real Kristevan joy ride." -- Adi Drori-Avraham, The Liberal
Product Description
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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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Hardcover
I'm quite familiar with Kristeva's theoretical texts and her fondness for pursuing a tangent or three. I also have to admit I gave up on the book 2/3 the way through even though I tried, I really tried to get to the end. In terms of truly making the leap from theorist to novelist, Kristeva holds back where Umberto Eco takes a bold leap. Eco wholeheartedly embraces the story telling process with fresh and innovative approaches, but still adheres to plot and character creating a wholly enjoyable read. Kristeva's characters lack substance, her main female protagonist, turns into a mouthpiece for Kristeva really, the well heeled anti-hero for some reason drives a Fiat Panda????!!!! and why in god's name would anyone on a half decent salary drive the length of Europe in a Fiat Panda if they were not a presenter on Top Gear proving a point? I understand that Kristeva is exploring ideas of Byzantium and interweaving with today's world but it is done very clumsily and in an irritating knowing, winking way that takes me back to some rather odd lectures on Psychoanalysis and its theory from my undergraduate days, its not subtle, its not skillful, its just not literary writing, she abandons her characters and often the plot itself to indulge her on preoccupations. Kristeva is too bound up in herself to lose herself in her characters and their stories and ultimately this spoils what could have been a very interesting book. I'm saddened as I would like to see a female writer giving the chaps a run for their money. Though interestingly in the actual murder mystery genre it is a genre where women writers dominate, so really Kristeva should have done a better job than she did.
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta)
Amazon.com:
4 reviews
16 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Misleading
26 Mar 2006
Format:Hardcover|Amazon Verified Purchase
The Publisher has done injustice to the reader and author by comparing this novel to Umberto Eco's The Name of the Rose. Whereas Eco's work is a rare jewel that seems to bet better with time, it cannot be compared to the current work. This author has her own voice and style that is much different than Eco. By making such claims, the reader familiar with the former work is naturally set up for a dissapointment and may miss what is good and notable in the present novel.
In particular, both authors have a great fund of knowlege of an area of history and have endeavored to create fiction using their historical and philosophical skills. The present author, unfortunately, creates diversions in her novel that distract the reader from becomming engrossed in the unique insights of the author. Such a novel should endeavor to educate and to entertain. The love affair between two of the main characters may serve as a basis for a subplot unpon which the main plot is built. In my opinion, however, it is an unwelcome distraction.
The author also attempts the difficult tast of moving back and forth between the remote past and the present, obviously an attempt to recreate the mindset of one of the murderers. This is necessary for the novel to work but either through translation or style it is awkward and sometimes difficult to follow. Faulkner was the master of this difficult genre and one shuns not the difficulty but admires the seamlessness.
Perhaps the most distracting and annoying part of the novel is the author's moralizing on current events in an attempt to create a thesis comparing 21st century American foreign policy to the Crusades. This is all well and good but the author here blurs the distinction between nonfiction and fiction. The art is in leading the reader to entertain such a thesis without stating it much less harping on it.
Finally, Eco's work is humble and patient in nature and despite his great intellect and grasp of his subject matter he never "talks down" to the reader. Here, one is annowed by the tone of the prose which is a bit snobbish and assumes a level of understanding and knowlege of facts, literature and events that few may have. In doing so, the author misses an opportunity to fully educate and share her deeper thoughts with a wider readership that will simply skim over the pedantic rantings to find out who done it. Tis a pity for the subject matter is rich and deserves better.
Nonetheless, the book is entertaining and worth reading. You would do better to approach it without the great expectations the publisher claims.
In particular, both authors have a great fund of knowlege of an area of history and have endeavored to create fiction using their historical and philosophical skills. The present author, unfortunately, creates diversions in her novel that distract the reader from becomming engrossed in the unique insights of the author. Such a novel should endeavor to educate and to entertain. The love affair between two of the main characters may serve as a basis for a subplot unpon which the main plot is built. In my opinion, however, it is an unwelcome distraction.
The author also attempts the difficult tast of moving back and forth between the remote past and the present, obviously an attempt to recreate the mindset of one of the murderers. This is necessary for the novel to work but either through translation or style it is awkward and sometimes difficult to follow. Faulkner was the master of this difficult genre and one shuns not the difficulty but admires the seamlessness.
Perhaps the most distracting and annoying part of the novel is the author's moralizing on current events in an attempt to create a thesis comparing 21st century American foreign policy to the Crusades. This is all well and good but the author here blurs the distinction between nonfiction and fiction. The art is in leading the reader to entertain such a thesis without stating it much less harping on it.
Finally, Eco's work is humble and patient in nature and despite his great intellect and grasp of his subject matter he never "talks down" to the reader. Here, one is annowed by the tone of the prose which is a bit snobbish and assumes a level of understanding and knowlege of facts, literature and events that few may have. In doing so, the author misses an opportunity to fully educate and share her deeper thoughts with a wider readership that will simply skim over the pedantic rantings to find out who done it. Tis a pity for the subject matter is rich and deserves better.
Nonetheless, the book is entertaining and worth reading. You would do better to approach it without the great expectations the publisher claims.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
I like the events more than the style
2 Sep 2011
Format:Paperback
Tossing off a stitch of creepy times.
I tend to think of modern politics as a combination that builds to the desire for its own conclusion:
Liberty, equality, fraternity, vasectomy.
Literary life has a streaky bacon style when each character is perfect at not being anyone else. Stephanie Delacour is the personification of an author who is bound to be plagued by everything. Julia Kristeva does not have to limit herself to autobiographical material to pick up the rude joy of the teasing cries of birds known as laughing gulls.
One of the characters, Sebastian Chrest-Jones, a scholar of mixed populations at the Institute of Migratory History, personifies mocking derision. As a scholar, Sebastian Chrest-Jones considers committing a crime "the height of bad taste" (p. 12), but when his charming laboratory colleague Fa Chang, who has only been his mistress for a few months, discloses that she will have a baby, his rage strangled her, put her body in a car, pushed the car over a cliff, so:
The car bobbed and spun over
a few times before sinking
into the deep water of Big
Stony Brook Pond. (p. 15).
People who have thousands of years between their days and a cumulative fatigue from an active forty-eight hours that did not allow him to sleep are in no mood for the kind of surprise that is likely to produce an obligation to nurture or support another human being for the next few decades, even if the announcement is:
Of course,
you are under no obligation.
I know how important your freedom is to you.
But it's important that you know,
and I prefer telling you on this very day,
such an important day for you,
for both of us,
even though it concerns only me
in a certain sense.
So, guess what?
I'm going to have a baby!
Isn't that fabulous? (p. 14).
I tend to think of modern politics as a combination that builds to the desire for its own conclusion:
Liberty, equality, fraternity, vasectomy.
Literary life has a streaky bacon style when each character is perfect at not being anyone else. Stephanie Delacour is the personification of an author who is bound to be plagued by everything. Julia Kristeva does not have to limit herself to autobiographical material to pick up the rude joy of the teasing cries of birds known as laughing gulls.
One of the characters, Sebastian Chrest-Jones, a scholar of mixed populations at the Institute of Migratory History, personifies mocking derision. As a scholar, Sebastian Chrest-Jones considers committing a crime "the height of bad taste" (p. 12), but when his charming laboratory colleague Fa Chang, who has only been his mistress for a few months, discloses that she will have a baby, his rage strangled her, put her body in a car, pushed the car over a cliff, so:
The car bobbed and spun over
a few times before sinking
into the deep water of Big
Stony Brook Pond. (p. 15).
People who have thousands of years between their days and a cumulative fatigue from an active forty-eight hours that did not allow him to sleep are in no mood for the kind of surprise that is likely to produce an obligation to nurture or support another human being for the next few decades, even if the announcement is:
Of course,
you are under no obligation.
I know how important your freedom is to you.
But it's important that you know,
and I prefer telling you on this very day,
such an important day for you,
for both of us,
even though it concerns only me
in a certain sense.
So, guess what?
I'm going to have a baby!
Isn't that fabulous? (p. 14).
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
11th Century Byzantium
14 Jan 2009
Format:Paperback
Murder in Byzantium
by Julia Kristeva
This contemporary story is included because of its hefty inclusion of information about the First Crusades and the world's first female historian, Anna Comnena (1083-1153). whom Kristeva sees as "the leading intellectual of her day."
The primary character is journalist Stephanie Delacour who has been sent from Paris to the fictional country of Santa Varvara to report on a serial killer busily dispatching members of the Mafia/terrorist based New Pantheon sect. Here she again meets Commisario Northrop Rilsky, who rapidly becomes her lover. While Northrop tracks down the source of the multiple murders, Stephanie researches the mysterious disappearance of the Commisario's relative, the eccentric medieval and migration historian Sebastian Chrest-Jones. It is Chrest-Jones's travels following the route of a French crusader which offers the fanciful but intriguing interpretation of the chaotic life and times of Anna Comnena.
This is not an easily read, straight forward story. Author Kristeva, a renowned French intellectual of Bulgarian birth, gives us an erudite, layered, and somewhat abstruse narrative. Intersected with the plot are musings about immigration, migration, globalization, the cultural clash between the East and Latin West, the Bogomil "heresy," persecuted Jews, devastated Thracian peasants, the Alexiad, Maria of Bulgaria, and so forth. A major theme is the connections between the world and ideas of the first Crusaders to those of today.
Maps of the routes of the French and German Crusaders during the First Crusades included. This is the author's second book with Delacour and Rilsky as investigators.
by Julia Kristeva
This contemporary story is included because of its hefty inclusion of information about the First Crusades and the world's first female historian, Anna Comnena (1083-1153). whom Kristeva sees as "the leading intellectual of her day."
The primary character is journalist Stephanie Delacour who has been sent from Paris to the fictional country of Santa Varvara to report on a serial killer busily dispatching members of the Mafia/terrorist based New Pantheon sect. Here she again meets Commisario Northrop Rilsky, who rapidly becomes her lover. While Northrop tracks down the source of the multiple murders, Stephanie researches the mysterious disappearance of the Commisario's relative, the eccentric medieval and migration historian Sebastian Chrest-Jones. It is Chrest-Jones's travels following the route of a French crusader which offers the fanciful but intriguing interpretation of the chaotic life and times of Anna Comnena.
This is not an easily read, straight forward story. Author Kristeva, a renowned French intellectual of Bulgarian birth, gives us an erudite, layered, and somewhat abstruse narrative. Intersected with the plot are musings about immigration, migration, globalization, the cultural clash between the East and Latin West, the Bogomil "heresy," persecuted Jews, devastated Thracian peasants, the Alexiad, Maria of Bulgaria, and so forth. A major theme is the connections between the world and ideas of the first Crusaders to those of today.
Maps of the routes of the French and German Crusaders during the First Crusades included. This is the author's second book with Delacour and Rilsky as investigators.
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