A literary tour de force . . . [HHhH] is a gripping novel that brings us closer to history as it really happened.” —Alan Riding, The New York Times Book Review
“[An] extraordinary first novel . . . HHhH, translated from the French by Sam Taylor, charts Heydrich's rise through the Nazi ranks and Germany's march to war . . . [to] the training in Britain of the Czech and Slovak assassins, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabcík, who parachuted into the country in December 1941 to kill Heydrich. Ample material for a decent espionage thriller, but Binet, ‘a slave to my scruples,' makes something altogether less commonplace of it.” —Chris Power, The Times (London)
“Captivating . . . [HHhH] has a vitality very different from that of most historical fiction.” —James Wood, The New Yorker
“HHhH blew me away. Binet's style fuses it all together: a neutral, journalistic honesty sustained with a fiction writer's zeal and story-telling instincts. It's one of the best historical novels I've ever come across.” —Bret Easton Ellis, author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero
“[Binet] knows how to wrangle powerful moments from history.” —Susannah Meadows, The New York Times
“[HHhH is] a marvelous, charming, engaging novel.” —Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles Times
“Every now and then a piece of work comes along that undermines the assumptions upon which all previous works have been built . . . These pieces of art complicate the genre for everyone that follows. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius did it for the memoir, Reservoir Dogs for action films, and now HHhH does it for the historical novel.” —David Annand, The Telegraph
“One of the best and most original new novels I've read in years.” —Mike Fischer, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel
“Ingenious and inventive . . . HHhH [is a] knockout blow in the boxing match of genre-defying literature. Binet steps between styles with ease . . . [and] has written a tale of Heydrich to defy most academic study. Moreover, Binet has managed to engage." —Charles J. Haynes, California Literary Review
“An impressive debut . . . HHhH is fascinating not only because of the subject matter, but also because of the immense amount of detail Binet includes. The book transports and enraptures. It also impresses upon the reader the legacy of that history.” —Ashley McNelis, Bomb
“[HHhH is] quirky, clever . . . Binet makes a very perceptive and informed recording angel, one with an exceptionally clear and unfussy prose style (rendered extremely well by the translator, Sam Taylor). It doesn't hurt that he has triple-A premium material, but Binet doesn't push too hard to give the events a meaning. He lets them be the tragedy that they are, and as such they're devastating.” —Lev Grossman, Time.com
“[HHhH] is as much a meditation on fictionalizing history—on factual truth versus a more expansive definition of truth, on the obligations and the agendas of writers—as it is a story about an assassination . . . Binet accomplishes something paradoxical. By clinging to the historical record and a very strict definition of truth, he transcends the barest facts and creates a work with its own heft and depth . . . [He] has produced the only essential piece of World War II fiction in years.” —Jessica Crispin, Barnes & Noble Review
“[HHhH] is utterly compelling and ruthlessly fascinating.” —Laurence Mackin, Irish Times
“A breezily charming novel, with a thrilling story that also happens to be true, by a gifted young author . . . [Binet] marshals and deploys his materials with exceptional dramatic skill . . . By the time you reach the book's devastating finale, it's this discreet storytelling mastery . . . that leaves the deepest impression.” —James Lasdun, The Guardian
“A cracking book . . . With its double-narrative and its authorial playfulness, HHhH reads in places like a stylistic homage to WG Sebald or Italo Calvino.” —Ruadhán MacCormaic, Irish Times
“That HHhH is so devastatingly brilliant is testament to both its originality and ambition. In fact, it would not be going too far to say it is a modern masterpiece.” —Rob Minshull, ABC (Brisbane)
“HHhH triumphs precisely because it not only delicately, and sometimes grippingly, depicts a major historical moment, but because it manages to depict the unique challenges of 21st-century remembrance.” —Michael Lapointe, The Globe and Mail
“HHhH is brilliant.” —Michel Basilières, The Toronto Star
“[A] remarkable first novel . . . Binet has created a rare thing: a book that tells us stories, mixing scholarship with suspense, while simultaneously laying bare and critiquing the book's construction. It's a difficult approach, which makes the enjoyment of reading it all the more striking.” —Matthew Tiffany, Plain-Dealer (Cleveland)
“There are not enough books that blend the profound and the entertaining. This is one and it comes in a sparkling translation by novelist Sam Taylor.” —John Gardner, New Zealand Herald
“An extraordinary first novel . . . A literary triumph . . . The books final section, which recounts the assassination and subsequent manhunt in minute detail, is a masterpiece of tension, and its closing pages are extremely moving. Very few page-turners come as smart and original as this.” —The Times (London)
“This is mesmeric stuff; history brought to chilling, potent life.” —Leyla Senai, The Independent
“I really don't know how to praise this book further than to say that it changed my conception of the possibilities of literature. I cannot recommend this book more highly than saying, despite the cliche, that it is an actual must-read, both for its important content, but as importantly, for its avant-garde nature as it pushes forward the boundaries of historical fiction.” —Joe Winkler, Vol. 1 Brooklyn
“A brilliantly profound debut about the assassination of the architect of the Holocaust . . . I found myself turning pages faster and faster while I read about the two men who parachuted into the countryside and slowly closed in on Heydrich, even though I knew exactly what was about to happen.” —Malcolm Jones, The Daily Beast
“Riveting . . . [HHhH is] exuberant and breathless and wonderful throughout.” —Weston Cutter, Kenyon Review
“HHhH is a highly original piece of work, at once charming, moving, and gripping.” —Martin Amis, author of The Pregnant Widow
“A wonderful, ambitious book, and a triumph of translation.” —Colum McCann, National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin
“HHhH is an astonishing book—absorbing, moving, for the agony and acuity with which its author engages the problem of making literary art from unbearable historical fact.” —Wells Tower, author of Everything Ravaged, Everything Burned
“A work of absolute originality.” —Claude Lanzmann
“By the time I got to the last page of Binet's masterpiece, I had to close my eyes and rethink history. I'm rethinking it still.” —Gary Shteyngart, author of Super Sad True Love Story
“Laurent Binet has given a new dimension to the non-fiction novel by weaving his writerly anxieties about the genre into the narrative, but his story is no less compelling for that, and the climax is unforgettable.” —David Lodge, Booker Prize-winning author of Small World and Nice Work
“HHhH offers something all too rare in contemporary literature: the excitement of encountering something that feels genuinely new. Laurent Binet has thrown all the rules of authorial decorum out the window, and the result is a historical novel of the Czech resistance to the Nazis that is a playful, suspenseful delight.” —John Wray, author of Lowboy
“Read HHhH and be hooked, horrified, haunted, and (h)enthralled.” —Bernard Pivot, JDD
“[A] tour de force . . . Gripping . . . Binet demonstrates without a doubt that a self-aware, cerebral structure can be deployed in the service of a gripping historical read. [HHhH is] a perfect fusion of action and the avante-garde that deserves a place as a great WWII novel.” —Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Readers will recognize why this brilliant work won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman—and why an English translation was imperative!” —Bryce Christensen, Booklist (starred review)
“[HHhH is a] soul-stirring work . . . 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.” —Kirkus (starred review)
By placing himself in the story, alongside Heydrich and his assassins, the narrator challenges the traditional way historical fiction is written. We join him on his research trips to Prague; we learn his reactions to documents, books and movies; we hear him admit that he sometimes imagines what he cannot possibly know. And, in the end, his making of a historical novel brings a raw truth to an extraordinary act of resistance. This literary tour de force, now smoothly translated by Sam Taylor …[leaves] one intriguing question…unanswered: Is this a true account of how Binet wrote his book or did he plan its unusual structure from the start? Either way, the result is a gripping novel that brings us closer to history as it really happened.
—The New York Times Book Review
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. (May)
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 Gabcík and the Czech Jan Kubiš, 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
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 (Gabcík the Slovak and Kubiš 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 Beneš, head of the Czech government-in-exile in London. He needed a coup to restore the morale of the Czech anti-Nazis. Gabcík and Kubiš 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.
