Author is Laurent Binet, a French author who has now published two novels. In both cases I listened about 70% as audiobook and 30% as reading as I had the Kindle joint text/audio option. In both cases, the English translations by Sam Taylor are a delight.
THE SEVENTH FUNCTION OF LANGUAGE is a comic novel in which a gruff French detective is investigating the death of Roland Barthes in 1980, who was actually killed by a laundry truck, and actually after having had lunch with Francois Mitterand. Unfortunately, all the persons of interest are semiologists, linguists, philosophers, existentialists, etc, which drives the policeman batty. He gets a postdoc assigned to him, it what is clearly a sidekick type role like Dr Watson. However, here it is the postdoc who is the "genius" making brilliant detections like Sherlock Holmes. The two also have cause to roam about Europe, Rome, Venice, attend a conference at Cornell, etc. One of the characters develops a suspicious around 2/3 through that he may be a character in a novel.
HHHH was his first novel. Ostensibly, it is a detailed historical novel about how two fighters in the Czech resistance actually assassinated the Nazi leader for Prague, Reinhard Heydrich, who was also an author of the Holocaust plan. However, the author spends variably a LOT of time talking to the reader about what he is doing, how his research is going, and so on. Sometimes a chapter is all in the voice of the author, and sometimes the voice of the author just shows up once in the middle of a chapter in a parenthetical. (Along the lines of, "I couldn't find out the name of the bridge they are crossing, despite weeks of research." "I can't quote the letter he is handing him, because I lost my xerox of it after I left the Warsaw archive last year.") HHHH is not a "comic" novel but it is an interesting and creative one.
I believe a movie was made based on HHHH but it is a normal "straight" movie only about the actual events in 1942 or 43.
Footnote
Another novel where the author talks to the reader, primarily in footnotes, is The French Lieutenant's Woman, (book 1969, film 1981). It was made into a movie and in the movie, they recreated this double perspective by having the characters be actors in a movie, so half the film is "inside" the historical movie and half the time is "the actors" talking to each other or off the set.
