Name: Murder in Byzantium: A Novel
SKU: 18773483
Price: 104.94 EUR
Availability: InStock
Author: Julia Kristeva

Type

Physical Book

Author

Julia Kristeva

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Year

2006

Language

English

Pages

264

Format

Hardcover

ISBN

0231136366

ISBN13

9780231136365

Edition No.

Synopsis "Murder in Byzantium: A Novel "

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.

Julia Kristeva

(Author)

View Author's Page

She is a writer, psychoanalyst, member of the University Institute of France, and a professor at the University Diderot-Paris VII, where she heads the Doctoral School "Language, Literature, Image" and the Roland Barthes Center. She holds doctorates from numerous universities and is a member of the Paris Psychoanalytic Society. She is part of the Economic and Social Council of France and chairs the National Council "Disability: Awareness, Information, Training". In 2004, she received the Holberg Prize (Norway); and in 2006, the Hannah Arendt Prize for Political Thought (Bremen). She has written about thirty books, novels, and essays, including Strangers to Ourselves (1988), The Samurai (1992), The Female Genius: Hannah Arendt, Vol. I (1999), Melanie Klein, Vol. II (2003), Colette: A Female Genius (2007).

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