HHhH

Starred review from February 27, 2012
Taking its title from the German for “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich,” Binet’s tour de force debut tells two stories: primarily that of the daring mission to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, the prominent Nazi Protector of Bohemia and Moravia known as “The Butcher” and “The Man with the Iron Heart” (a nickname of Hitler’s creation) among other epithets. It is also, however, the metafictional tale of Binet’s struggles with shaping the story. The novel’s 257 short chapters allow for these two strands to advance and entwine in gripping and revealing ways. When Binet stamps a key scene with the progressive dates of the three weeks in 2008 that it took him to render the eight-hour standoff in 1942, for instance, it deepens an already intense scene with a sense of the author’s reluctance to dispatch characters he admires. Those men, Jan Kubis and Jozef Gabcik, “authors of one of the greatest acts of resistance in human history,” were trained in England and parachuted back into Nazi-occupied Bohemia on a mission they both knew might be suicidal. After months of planning, on May 27, 1942, they ambushed Heydrich in Prague. Weeks later they were cornered in a church basement, and Binet renders an almost unbearable account of their final hours fending off the SS. With history never in question, it is Binet’s details (such as Heydrich succumbing to an infection from having “horsehairs from the Mercedes’s seats” blasted into his spleen) and his compassion for the partisans that elevate these set pieces. His thoughts on the perils of the genre are also succinct and striking; inserting invented characters into historical novels is “like planting false proof at a crime scene where the floor is already strewn with incriminating evidence.” Binet demonstrates without a doubt that a self aware, cerebral structure can be deployed in the service of a gripping historical read. A perfect fusion of action and the avante-garde that deserves a place as a great WWII novel.

Starred review from May 1, 2012
The evergreen allure of Nazis as the embodiment of evil is what drives this French author's soul-stirring work: a hybrid of fact and meta-fiction that won the Prix Goncourt in 2010. Picture a man being driven to work in an open-top car, taking the same route every day. He is feared and loathed by passersby, yet he has no bodyguard. This is Heydrich in Prague in 1942: the Nazi Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, supremely powerful, supremely vulnerable. He is Binet's anti-hero. His projected assassination is Binet's story, and Heydrich's would-be assassins (Gabcik the Slovak and Kubis the Czech) are Binet's heroes. "Two men have to kill a third man." Simple, no? But the narration is not. Binet's alter ego narrator is a zealous amateur historian. Like all amateurs, he makes mistakes; disarmingly, he admits them. "I've been talking rubbish," he exclaims. He retracts some of his assertions; he regrets his inadequacy as a historian. Yet in fact he does a good job of putting the assassination in a geopolitical context. He excoriates the spinelessness of the British and French governments in acceding to Hitler's takeover of Czechoslovakia. He convincingly profiles Heydrich, aka the Blond Beast and the Hangman of Prague. This monster was Himmler's deputy in the SS (the goofy title refers to the belief that he was also Himmler's brain) and the principal architect of the Final Solution. The assassination, dubbed Operation Anthropoid, was the brainchild of Benes, head of the Czech government-in-exile in London. He needed a coup to restore the morale of the Czech anti-Nazis. Gabcik and Kubis parachute in. The arrival of these modest yet extraordinary patriots is like the first hint of dawn after a pitch-black night. They are embedded with the Czech resistance while they plan tactics. The account of the assassination attempt and its nail-biting aftermath is brilliantly suspenseful. Binet deserves great kudos for retrieving this fateful, half-forgotten episode, spotlighting Nazi infamy, celebrating its resisters, and delivering the whole with panache.

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Starred review from May 15, 2012

Binet (La vie professionnelle de Laurent B) has written two novels in one here. The first is an often mesmerizing account of the assassination of the Blond Beast, Reinhard Heydrich, the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia when those parts of dismembered Czechoslovakia were under German occupation during World War II. The second novel, which runs contiguously with the first, is a very self-conscious and ongoing explanation about how he wrote the book. The plot traces the trajectories of the Slovak Jozef Gabcik and the Czech Jan Kubis, sent by the British secret service, as they parachute into their country to assassinate the Nazi overlord. In tailing them on their mission, the author also supplies a brief bio of the Nazi leader, known at the time as the most dangerous man in the Third Reich. The book's title consists of the German letters for "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich" (Heydrich reported directly to Nazi Gestapo chief Heinrich Himmler). VERDICT Binet won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, France's most prestigious literary prize, for HHhH. This fluid translation by Taylor is a superb choice for lovers of historical literary works and even international thrillers. Most highly recommended.--Edward Cone, New York

Copyright 2012 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from April 15, 2012
The story of how two Czech agentsrecruited by the British secret serviceassassinated Hitler's ruthless lieutenant Reinhard Heydrich in broad daylight on a Prague street in 1942 has been told by the historian. Now it is the novelist's turn. And what a turn Binet delivers! Weaving together historical fact, fictional narrative, and authorial reflection in what he labels an infranovel, Binet gives readers a close-up look at the metamorphosis of documentary truth into literary art. It is an art that makes disturbingly real the cold cruelty of a Nazi titan intent on slaughtering innocent Jews and makes inspiringly luminous the courage of Josef Gabcik and Jan Kubi, the men who kill him. But it is also a curiously hybrid art that foregrounds the creative artist's own struggle to wrest meaning out of his anarchic material. Nowhere is this struggle more evident than in Binet's handling of the bizarre climax of his chronicle, when Gabcik stares down Heydrich's car, only to have his gun jam, forcing Kubi to lob a bomb, leaving the wounded Nazi leader to die days later of an infection. Readers will recognize why this brilliant work won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Romanand why an English translation was imperative!(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)