The Samurai

Julia Kristevas dazzling fictional debut is an intellectual adventure, full of vitality, sensuousness, and sustained lyricism. Reminiscent of The Mandarins, Simone de Beauvoirs 1954 masterpiece, The Samurai brilliantly reconstructs a pivotal era of postwar French historyParis in the late 1960sand 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 warriorsthe samurai for whom writing is the only lasting act of pleasure and war combined. 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 Maos Chinawhere revolutionary idealism collides with cold pragmatismto 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 textlanguage, prison, madness, emotional rupturesare 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.