HHhH A Novel

by Binet, Laurent; Taylor, Sam

• ISBN13: 9780374169916
• ISBN10: 0374169918
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2012-04-24
• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Summary

Laurent Binet's HHhH, winner of thePrix Goncourt du Premier Roman, is "a work of breadth, and absolute originality" (Claude Lanzmann) Everyone has heard of Reinhard Heydrich, "the Butcher of Prague." And most have heard stories of his spectacular assassination at the hands of two Czechoslovakian partisans. But who exactly were the forgotten heroes who killed one of history's most notorious men? In Laurent Binet's captivating debut novel, HHhH( Himmlers Hirn heiBt Heydrich, or Himmler's brain is called Heydrich), we follow the lives of Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, the Slovak and the Czech responsible for Heydrich's death. From their heroic escape from Nazi-occupied Prague to their recruitment by the British secret services; from their meticulous preparation and training to their harrowing parachute drop into a war zone; from their stealth attack on Heydrich's car to their own brutal deaths in the basement of a Prague church, Binet narrates the compelling story of these two incredible men, rescuing their heroic acts from obscurity. The winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman, Binet's HHhHis a novel unlike anything else. A seemingly effortless blend of historical truth, personal memory, and Binet's remarkable imagination, HHhHis a work at once thrilling and deeply engrossinga historical novel and a profound meditation on the nature of writing and the debt we owe to history.

Author Biography

Laurent Binet was born in Paris, France, in 1972. He is the author of La Vie professionnelle de Laurent B., a memoir of his experience teaching in secondary schools in Paris. In March 2010, his debut novel, HHhH, won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman. Laurent Binet is a professor at the University of Paris III, where he lectures on French literature.

Table of Contents

“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

“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)

 

“The story of how two Czech agents—recruited by the British secret service—assassinated 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 Kubiš, 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 Kubiš 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 Roman—and why an English translation was imperative!” —Bryce Christensen, Booklist (starred review)

Excerpts

1
 
 
Gabcík—that’s his name—really did exist. Lying alone on a little iron bed, did he hear, from outside, beyond the shutters of a darkened apartment, the unmistakable creaking of the Prague tramways? I want to believe so. I know Prague well, so I can imagine the tram’s number (but perhaps it’s changed?), its route, and the place where Gabcík waits, thinking and listening. We are at the corner of Vyšehradská and Trojická. The number 18 tram (or the number 22) has stopped in front of the Botanical Gardens. We are, most important, in 1942. InThe Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera implies that he feels a bit ashamed at having to name his characters. And although this shame is hardly perceptible in his novels, which are full of Tomášes, Tominas, and Terezas, we can intuit the obvious meaning: what could be more vulgar than to arbitrarily give—from a childish desire for verisimilitude or, at best, mere convenience—an invented name to an invented character? In my opinion, Kundera should have gone further: what could be more vulgar than an invented character?
So, Gabcík existed, and it was to this name that he answered (although not always). His story is as true as it is extraordinary. He and his comrades are, in my eyes, the authors of one of the greatest acts of resistance in human history, and without doubt the greatest of the Second World War. For a long time I have wanted to pay tribute to him. For a long time I have seen him, lying in his little room—shutters closed, window open—listening to the creak of the tram (going which way? I don’t know) that stops outside the Botanical Gardens. But if I put this image on paper, as I’m sneakily doing now, that won’t necessarily pay tribute to him. I am reducing this man to the ranks of a vulgar character and his actions to literature: an ignominious transformation, but what else can I do? I don’t want to drag this vision around with me all my life without having tried, at least, to give it some substance. I just hope that, however bright and blinding the veneer of fiction that covers this fabulous story, you will still be able to see through it to the historical reality that lies behind.


 
Copyright © 2009 by Éditions Grasset et Fasquelle
Translation copyright © 2012 by Sam Taylor