HHhH: A Novel

The most important step to enjoying "HHhH," the fantastic debut novel by Laurent Binet, is the same as the most important step for enjoying a plane ride, a scuba dive, or a bondage S&M session: you must trust your partner. "HHhH" is the story of Laurent Binet trying to tell a story of two World War II assassins on a mission to kill a devious Nazi. It's the story of the rise of that devious Nazi (Reinhard Heydrich), the fall of Czechoslovakia, and the birth of the Final Solution. It's a trip through Binet's mind, with all the back alleyways of an old Prague neighborhood and enough asides to tire a reluctant Dutch prince. At once a treatise on historical fiction, a postmodern meditation on the role of an author, and a gripping suspense yarn with one of the simplest of plots (two guys try to kill another dude), "HHhH" is a book you need to pick up and read, like, right now. In the first few pages Binet admits he doesn't want to condemn our brave assassins to the world of the "vulgar character." But what, Binet asks, is he supposed to do? Should he "...drag this vision around with me all my life without having tried, at least to give it some substance." Throughout the story, Binet grapples with how to best tell this story. Truth be told, I have always been turned off by the hijinks and trickery of meta-fiction. The sort of safety net it provides - I'm playing a joke on the reader but if it doesn't work, perhaps that's part of the joke - is what irritates me, but the fact that Binet comes out and says that he is not embracing meta fiction as much as he is beaten down by it, that this story is as much his as it is his characters - that type of sincerity is rare and invigorating. Yes, Binet will interject himself into the story. In the end, this is a story of a man trying to figure out how to tell a fantastic story without obscuring it with the haze of fiction. You have to trust his vision and just enjoy the ride. The story begins with the author's first awareness of the plot, charts the rise of Reinhard Heydrich to the top of the insidious SS, and maps out the evolution of the Final Solution - and how much of the Nazis' most monstrous plots seemed to have Heydrich at the center of them. In the beginning, Binet will show his research and erudition, documenting everything known about the beginnings of Heydrich and our two assassins. He will recount anecdotes, discuss the training of the assassins, and where each of the players were at different turns of WWII history. At turns hilarious, informative, and gripping, "HHhH" was really tough for me to put down. One highlight from the author's research for me was a previously unknown story regarding Heydrich's hobby as Luftwaffe pilot, and another with the Ukranian national soccer team. Some of the criticisms of "HHhH" state that Binet masquerades as a non-fiction book that will from time to time slide back into fictional creation - inventing a scene at Auschwitz, discussing Himmler's reaction to a certain event that he has no historical basis for (then, in a fit of postmodernism, wavers on whether to include said reaction), or how Heydrich feels about Albert Speer - but I believe these criticisms are off base. This is a story of Binet deciding how to tell a story, and though he does invent occasionally throughout the pages it is not a deal breaker for me. However, I was slightly surprised that in parts of this book Binet seems to lambast Jonathan Littell, author of "The Kindly Ones." Binet does not love TKO like I did (as unpublished parts of the manuscript which appeared on The Millions certainly prove), and doesn't believe in the fictional creation of characters in a historical setting. That's what Binet can't handle - he knows that Littell has invented some, and thus he doesn't know what to believe and what not to believe. This has struck some readers as hypocritical, as Binet has done the same thing on a smaller scale - he is still a novelist after all, not a documentarian. Binet says that "creating characters to understand historical fact is like fabricating evidence." Of course, this is where Binet is off base, as Littell is not only trying to understand historical fact but also tell a story of Greek justice, the guilt of a murderous state, and the voice of genocidal perpetrator. But I am getting off track. As I have said throughout, Binet has written a masterful novel. He has attempted to tell the story of real people, real fighters, real monsters, real murder, real massacres, and to do that he turned them into fiction. "Unfair," Binet writes, "but there you go." And in converting them to fiction, he produced an amazing addition for any literary bookshelf.

"HHhH" is a well written but unusually formatted historical fiction about an actual event that is worth knowing about. The story has an easy flow and is easily comprehended. The story changes scenes quickly and has 257 chapters in about 336 pages. The novel is built around a plan to assassinate a Nazi Official during World War II. Reinhard Heydrich was a high ranking Nazi Official completely committed to the so called "final solution" of mass murder. The general story is well known to students of WWII. This novel first called to my attention by a very serious reader who felt it is one of the best books he had ever read. He is very well read but was unfamiliar with this story. To him this was a true mesmerizing page turner. The reason I mention that is that I did know the real story and although I enjoyed the book, I was not held in suspense and did not enjoy the book as much as my friend. Therefore how much one enjoys the book may be affected by one's fore knowledge. What makes the novel so unusual is that the author integrates his own experience of writing the book into the story. He writes a passage and then talks about his own experience writing the passage. The novel has been described by others as "metafiction". I am uncredentialed as a student of literature and I am not sure what is meant exactly. In summary I like this novel very much. I did not enjoy it as much as some other readers. As stated this may be because I already was familiar with this chapter of World War II. I only state in case a prospective reader also already knows the story. The author's own experience in writing the book is integrated into the book. One may or may not enjoy that. Thank You...

I had this on my shelf for quite some time (and I absolutely fell in love with it the first time I read it) but I admit, I picked it up when I needed some additional research material for the project I was working on. Reading it the second time was probably even better than the first, and I definitely owe the author a review. The novel (even though it’s so extremely well researched that it can easily be used as non-fiction given that you are already familiar with the subject matter and can easily separate fact from fiction) is brilliant. Simple as that. It’s vivid, snappy with its short and straight-to-the-point chapters, hilarious and tragic at the same time. It deals with what I personally consider the most prominent assassination in WW2 history - the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich - yet, it goes far beyond the simple enumeration of facts and dry retelling of a familiar story. By the end of the first half of the novel, you feel like you know Heydrich personally - his habits, personality, past and present, good and bad (well, mostly bad, and Mr. Binet can be rather ruthless at times with his “character,” but he does it with such a delightful ease that it feels like he picks on his friend whom he doesn’t particularly like but can’t stop hanging out with). By the end of the second half, you get to know the two “heroes” - Kubiš and Gabčík - and you get to know them so well that they become living and breathing people and not some faceless historical figures, in whose honor the plaque in Prague was created. Speaking of Prague, Binet’s descriptions of it are incredible! I absolutely adored the composition of the novel itself and the way the author “speaks” to his readers, which makes the narration so much more personal. His fascination with all three - the two protagonists and the antagonist - is palpable and his passion for history and its tiniest details is worth admiration. Witty and direct, this historical novel certainly should find its way to every history lover’s bookshelf. Highly recommended!

Laurent Binet (born 19 July 1972) is a French writer the son of a historian; he was born in Paris, graduated from the University of Paris with a degree in literature, and taught literature in a Parisian suburb and eventually at the University. He was awarded the 2010 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman for his first novel, HHhH. The novel recounts the assassination of Nazi leader Reinhardt Heydrich in 1942. This novel is translated from the French by Sam Taylor a British author. This was Taylor's first translation. The unusual title of the novel (HHhH) is derived from the initials of the German nickname given Reinhardt Heydrich ""HHhH," "Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich" -- "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich." Heydrich was a particularly infamous and dangerous man who rose to power during the genesis of the Third Reich as part of Hitler's regime. The story is told by the author as the narrator of the composition. The novel was peculiar to the extent that while it is a work of fiction the author plied his pen diligently in an attempt to avoid providing detail that would have been clearly gleaned from his imagination; he was, however, fraught with indecision at doing so and perhaps unwittingly fell into the trap anyway. His determination to write from the historical facts produced a tome that was not particularly engaging, a result no doubt of that decision. The novel chronicles the historical events leading up to and following the assignation of Reinhardt Heydrich in Prague on May 27, 1942 by a small band of resistance fighters recruited in London and parachuted into the German territory for the mission. The aspect of the work which struck me most was really a question: who did Laurent intend would read his novel? It appeared to me that the reader was almost obliged to have a pretty good understanding of the history surrounding the events to start with; otherwise he was going to be lost in an unexplained serving of non-translated German expressions and words and unfamiliar places and people. It crossed my mind on many occasions that a map pointing out the various places chronicled in the novel would have been helpful, as well as some pictures of places or historical artifacts to bring the work more to life. Most vexing, however, is the authors digressions into plainly detached musing, often inviting familiarity with a person or persons unbeknownst to the reader and unexplained by the author as in the dialog with Marjane Satrapi; and her relevance is what exactly? - Or perhaps the dalliance with Flaubert; who? One gets the distinct impression that Binet is trying to impress us with his literary knowledge, as if it had anything to do with the assassination of the butcher of Prague. His obsession clouds the work. In the end, I thought the novel was just okay. If Binet had left out all of his musing, the whole novel would have been about 100 pages long. It may have made a better novella. I would recommend the novel with reservations and rate it generally pleasurable but not memorable and better suited to the elite of literature and history.

This is an addictive story that is clearly written and translated well. The chapters are short and “to the point.” This makes the book easy to read, put down, and pick up again later without losing your “train of thought.” Although parts of this book are clearly fiction/surmise, the majority paints an accurate picture of a cruel Nazi regime and a heinous Nazi zealot who was actually the mastermind behind the Holocaust. The author paints a picture of the planning and execution of the assassination of Rinehard Heydrich. It depicts the brave Czech parachutists who planned the demise of this cruel Nazi. The book describes how these Czech heroes held off a plethora of Nazi troops as long as they could, and made the ultimate sacrifice. The story is tragic, but shows that heroes emerge even in the most difficult of times. The author uses short, descriptive chapter, followed by shorter direct chapters with key facts, intermingled with short chapters of pure editorializing written in the “first person.” This reminds me, in some form, of Kurt Vonnegut’s writing. I also applaud the translator. I highly recommend this book, especially to those with an interest in the Czechs during World War II and The Holocaust.

I feel a certain kinship with--and antipathy for--Laurent Binet. Having spent the last six years researching and writing Resistance , my own take on the 1942 assassination of Reinhard Heydrich--after spending the decade before that plotting my approach to the project--I can understand his obsession with the subject. It's a relatively unknown story--not part of the collective consciousness, at least--but it feels, to us at least, like something everyone should learn about in school. One of the most evil men in European history, assassinated by parachutists on a secret mission--who wouldn't want to know about that? So we've apparently both studied it with a fervor worthy of Sean Connery's character in "Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade." It's a hallowed obsession, this thirst for the truth about a historical moment so pure and pristine that it becomes our own personal Holy Grail. There's a chapter early on where he discusses the time he spends studying the assassination, the years where, as he puts it, "this story keeps growing inside me." "I learn loads of things, some with only a distant connection to Heydrich, but I tell myself that everything can be useful, that I must immerse myself in a period to understand its spirit--and the thread of knowledge, once you pull at it, continues unraveling on its own," Binet writes, and I could have just as easily written the same words myself. (Like Binet, I became an information sponge for all things related to my topic--filling bookshelves with dusty out-of-print volumes, scribbling in dozens of notebooks, tramping down side streets in parts of Prague where few foreigners visit, or travelling by train and bus to the corners of the Czech Republic.) "The vastness of the information I amass ends up frightening me." And then: "I get the feeling that my thirst for documentation, healthy to begin with, is becoming a little bit dangerous--a pretext, basically, for putting off the moment when I have to start writing." Historical fiction is a dicey proposition--every writer, and every reader, has their own personal comfort level of how much history they want to mix with how much fiction, and those comfort levels may not line up for a given combination of author and reader and topic. And Binet's book is as much about finding that mix--about the ethics of weaving real people into made-up scenes--as it is about the events themselves. Thus it ends up alternately engrossing and aggravating, impossible to put down, but also impossible to accept at face value--or at least without at least a further level of discussion and qualification and qualm. Is Binet asking that historical fiction be held to the same standards as history? That seems a pedantic proposition, one with which I could never agree. I was a history major as an undergraduate, and history is a high-maintenance woman--you have to keep paying attention, all the time; you have to get everything right. The slightest error--a missed clue, a wrong interpretation of a slender sentence--and you unexpectedly become an also-ran, an object of ridicule and scorn. Whereas historical fiction is--or should be--somewhat less demanding, fatter and more generous, comfortable in its own skin, loving and available. Is that fair to the dead who populate its pages? They were real people; they lived and breathed and struggled and died, often for very noble causes, often in ways that the living could never live up to. Is it right for an author to bend their stories to shape his or her purposes? To be honest, I don't really care--or I care, but not nearly as much as Binet does. Why not? Because historical fiction is fun, and necessary. T.E. Lawrence's family reportedly wasn't happy with "Lawrence of Arabia," a movie that portrayed their loved one, at times, as a glory-seeking egomaniac. And while there are moments in the movie that are clearly drawn directly from Lawrence's "Seven Pillars of Wisdom," there are other major plot points that directly contradict that book. In the movie, Lawrence leads a ragtag collection of Bedouin warriors directly through the Nefud Desert to attack a key objective, ignoring the naysayers who tell him the Nefud cannot be crossed; partly through this superhuman feat, he becomes a larger-than-life figure, looked up to and admired by all. Whereas in the book, he leads his men around the Nefud, because--as he describes it--the Nefud cannot be crossed! When I first read this, I was angry at the movie for deceiving me on such a major point--but I learned to forgive it, because it was (and is) one of my favorite films, one of those movies that (as Roger Ebert said when defining his classics) one simply can't bear the thought of not watching again. "Lawrence of Arabia" may have been as much about David Lean and Robert Bolt as it was about T.E. Lawrence, but it connected with me and stuck with me in a way that a stricter biopic never would have. (That's not to say anything goes; an author should know what the people behind his major characters were about, what made them tick, what they sought and what they avoided. It would be unconscionable, to, say, write a World War II story and make Heydrich or Hitler the good guy.) Still, we HAVE TO take the statues off their pedestals and breathe life into them in order to connect with them emotionally, to look into their face and see a bit of ourselves. We have to distort the past in order to save it. And Binet gets that, to some extent--more than his critics would admit, at least; in a sense, this book is about starting out with the strictures of history and relaxing into fiction, and Binet's periodic self-flagellation on the topic gradually gives way to enjoyment and ease. (A quick aside: I can relate to the historical hand-wringing--one of the assassins' first names is variously spelled Jozef or Josef in different historical sources, and I lost a little sleep about which one to use.) Along the way, Binet takes the time to make some interesting observations. In one of my favorite sections, he puts up a bit of ham-handed expository dialogue between one of the future assassins and his fellow soldiers. The dialogue really doesn't seem realistic, and in Binet's next chapter, he admits he made the whole scene up--but then he presents an additional bit of awful expository dialogue and reveals that this bit was directly quoted from the participants' recollections. Is it better dialogue, given its greater reliability? Should it serve the reader or the historian? To his great credit, Binet explores these questions while keeping the narrative brisk; it is a page-turner (or screen-presser, I suppose I should say, since I read it on a Kindle). And by the end of the book, he's writing the scenes he hadn't given himself permission to write; it's like he's siding with freedom over tyranny both in the symbolic sense and in his own approach to the story. But that's my main problem with the book. Binet says he's writing to try and convince his characters that their bravery was worthwhile, that their victory was worth its tremendous human cost--but what right does he have to say that, from the comfort and safety of 70 years on? What right does he have, when the limited historical record suggests they were wracked with guilt over the reprisals that happened after their assassination? (The history of this story is admittedly difficult; enough of the participants died in its aftermath that there's little record of exactly what they said or did at key junctions. Binet admits that: "My story has as many holes in it as a novel," he writes. "But in an ordinary novel, it is the novelist who decides where these holes should occur. Because I am a slave to my scruples, I'm incapable of making that decision." Yet he doesn't admit to making the greatest artistic decision the historian makes--the only artistic decision every historian, no matter how scrupulous, must make--when to start and stop the story, and whom to focus on.) It's easy to second-guess characters and come down on the right side of things when writing historical fiction; it's easy to look at the funeral of a leading Nazi and the sufferings of his assassins and decide we'd rather side with them. There are no consequences to the decision, other than getting to bathe in their reflected glory. We don't have to worry about friends and family being shot, we don't have to wonder if the greatest and most momentous thing we ever did was a mistake. The more distance between an author and his historical subjects, the easier it is to praise their courage--and the less it means. Heroism and writing about heroism are two entirely separate things; writing about bravery isn't necessarily brave.

HHhH is a terrific read. Part novel, part history, all riveting. Binet has taken the husk of what we call the historical novel and made it something his own, personal in his telling yet universal in its approach to the great crime of the 20th century, Nazism. HHhH is the acronym for the phrase "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich." Reinhard Heydrich is Himmler's number two, a rising star in the Nazi superstructure. He is the brutal SS ruler of what is now the Czech Republic and was then occupied by the Nazis. He was called The Beast of Prague for good reason. He was assassinated by a partisan bomb blast in 1942, and his death unleashed a frenzy of Nazi retribution. That is the story of this book, its plot, so to speak. But there is a parallel text, Binet's thoughts on the difficulties he has set himself in trying to write an honest book. What is true? What is fiction? What is history? What is the duty of a novelist towards history, truth, and art? Normally, I hate self-referential asides by an author to his reader, but in this case Binet's struggle to write is an organic part of the book: we would not be able to understand Heydrich and his death if we did not have Binet to set us in the proper position to see the events he recounts through Binet's gaze. The history of Heydrich, his death, the consequences, are what propels us from page to page, but we can only turn that page when Binet has satisfied himself (and us) that he has given us the truth. This book is both a remarkable performance and a remarkable document. He writes as Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones swept the book world. Binet hates Littell's work for all the right reasons. Binet's publisher removed most all of Binet's comments on The Kindly Ones, but the excised sections can be read on-line, and they should be, in The Millions.

This book was urged upon me by someone whose taste in reading I know and respect. I must admit, though, that I was reluctant to read yet another book about Nazis; even more, yet another book that seemed that seemed likely to offer up torture scenes; having been an avid and omnivorous reader for about 70 years, I have been long saturated with both ingredients. But as soon as I began reading HHhH, I was immediately captivated by the problem of authorial voice with which Binet was wrestling. By the time I finished I knew that the author had worked some kind of magic on me, but I wasn’t sure how he had done it. So I went back to read it for a second time. (I’ve been doing this more and more--and rewardingly so with books that have especially interesting techniques: most recently Nabokov’s Pale Fire and the first two volumes of Hilary Mantel’s trilogy and currently a biography of Socrates by Bettany Hughes). As I was re-reading HHhH , I became curious to find out what other readers--ordinary readers, not professional blurb writers--have thought of it, so I went to the reviews on Amazon. Well. While plowing through most of the words of the 193 often-baffling and misleading reviews of Laurent Binet’s HHhH on this site, it became painfully aware to me that there was serious need for a corrective. Only a handful of those reviewers recognized that this book was essentially about the problems inherent in trying to write historical fiction, especially dialogue. (Having tried writing historical fiction myself, I very much identified with these parts of the story.) To illustrate the pitfalls confronting anyone who tries to write veristic historical novels, Binet chose a topic that has obviously long obsessed him--the assassination of Heydrich and its aftermath. (But--to make his point--he could just as well have selected any other event in history that had consequences--for example such strongly repercussive assassinations as Archduke Ferdinand, Lincoln, or Julius Caesar.) As compelling as the stories of Heydrich and his assassins are (you can get most of what Binet has to say at Google or in books or movies), of even more interest--because it was unlike anything I had ever read--was the author’s discussions of his research and his attempts to experiment with different kinds of dialogue. It seems that these are the very parts most readers seem to find annoying ‘digressions’. I think what happened is that Binet wrote a different book than readers--including me--had formed in their minds before reading; so strongly set was a stereotyped novel about an evil Nazi, etc, that most readers were not able to cope with the subtle surprise they met in this wonderfully original way of telling about an actual historical event. As I said, for full appreciation of the author’s feat, I had to go back and read it a second time.