There’s little in the storytelling part of the book that improves on or effectively dramatizes the accounts of historians much of his “story” consists of (a very meticulous) collation of sources. He professes a hatred of invented dialogue in historical fiction, but one starts to suspect it’s because he can’t quite swing it himself. I suspect he didn’t have the stamina or self-confidence to present the entire story this way so he stages a few scenes and (for pages and pages) summarizes the rest. Every so often, Binet will write out some movie-like scene of sinister Nazis or brave Resistance fighters, then in the next section start some hand-wringing or eye-rolling about how he made this or that detail up, or can’t verify the color of the car or something. The tone and tense shift is the main change he’s made to “novelize” things. I have done so much of the same research, and read so many of the same books, that I realized very quickly that the storytelling portions of the book are actually just capsule summaries made in colloquial present tense. HHhH is intercut with sections detailing his endless anxieties about the subtle falsifications of history in the historical fiction genre and about poetic license generally. Though I do wonder if I’d have felt that sting if Binet had been an English-language novelist: Given that the discussion below is negative, I may be manifesting a subconscious sense of territoriality so Monsieur Binet, if you are reading this, congratulations on your success, and feel free to dismiss me as a jealous unknown.Īs far as my conscious mind goes, the only one I can vouch for, really, my conscious mind was thinking: “Here’s a writer with an identical obsession! Another guy who can’t stop reading about Heydrich and Anthropoid! Are there others out there? Are we a secret society? If we aren’t, should we form one? I can’t wait to see how he put the history to dramatic use!” I could feel interest and kinship without professional competition. This huge distance beween our projects was a good thing. I had a personal interest in the novel: I am currently writing a novel in which Heydrich plays a major role, though it’s not quite, er, the same beast (hint: werewolves!). This book concerns Operation Anthropoid, the plot to assassinate the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich. I sought out with immense eagerness the English translation of Laurent Binet’s Prix-Goncourt-winning novel, HHhH.

Binet laurent hhhh