But it’s all done to honor these men, the families that helped them and the innocent people who were lost it’s a debt Binet keenly feels he owes to history, and the reader can’t help but be moved by it too.

It’s a testament to both Binet’s writing and the power of the story itself that this “novel” compels beyond the author’s tormented analysis. Instead, the author obsesses over minutiae and berates himself for delivering anything less than the truth. If telling the story were that easy, Binet’s book would be 30 pages long. The heroic men, for their part, were trapped and killed in a church. German authorities razed the nearby town of Lidice in retaliation-an act that stunned and infuriated countries around the globe. With aid from a network of fellow spies and sympathetic Czech families, Jozef Gab˘cík and Jan Kubi˘s successfully execute a surprise attack that wounds and eventually kills Heydrich. HHhH (an acronym for a German phrase that translates to “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”) is the story of two parachutists, one Czech and one Slovak, who infiltrated Nazi-occupied Prague in 1942 to kill one of Hitler’s deputies, Reinhard Heydrich. Yet Binet is doing his damnedest to respect historical record and the lives of two bold men who helped turn the tide of opinion in the early days of World War II. HHhH is, in fact, fraught with capitulations and frustrations-all of which the author himself painstakingly details. The French literature professor doesn’t know all that much about one of the mission’s heroes, and tracking down indisputable data proved difficult. This historical fiction book is not, as author Laurent Binet wanted, named after Operation Arthropoid, the real-life secret mission it details. HHhH est son premier roman.By Laurent Binet. Agrégé de lettres, il est professeur de français en Seine-Saint-Denis depuis dix ans et chargé de cours à l'Université. Il a effectué son service militaire en Slovaquie et a partagé son temps entre Paris et Prague pendant plusieurs années. He was awarded the 2010 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman for his first novel, HHhH. Son of an historian, Binet was born in Paris, graduated from University of Paris in literature, and taught literature in Parisian suburb and eventually at University. Il a effectué son service militaire en Slovaquie et a partagé son temps entre Paris et Prague pendant plusieurs années. A seemingly effortlessly blend of historical truth, personal memory, and Laurent Binet's remarkable imagination, HHhH an international bestseller and winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman is a work at once thrilling and intellectually engrossing, a fast-paced novel of the Second World War that is also a profound meditation on.

Hhhh laurent binet book review