HHhH
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- £6.99
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- £6.99
Publisher Description
THE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER
Two men have been enlisted to kill the head of the Gestapo. This is Operation Anthropoid, Prague, 1942: two Czechoslovakian parachutists sent on a daring mission by London to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich - chief of the Nazi secret services, 'the hangman of Prague', 'the blond beast', 'the most dangerous man in the Third Reich'. His boss is Heinrich Himmler but everyone in the SS says 'Himmler's brain is called Heydrich', which in German spells HHhH.
HHhH is a panorama of the Third Reich told through the life of one outstandingly brutal man, a story of unbearable heroism and loyalty, revenge and betrayal. It is a moving and shattering work of fiction.
Laurent Binet's highly anticipated new novel, The Seventh Function of Language, is available for pre-order now...
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
Customer Reviews
Outstanding!
I have never read anything like this - absolutely brilliant.
HhhH
What a totally different but excellent way to develop a book that presents so vividly one of the most courageous acts of the Second World War!
I was already familiar with the story through movies and history bookstore, but this book really brought it home to me, particularly enhanced by the very unusual method of writing a story within the story of how you developed the book in the first place!! Absolutely brilliant and I recommend it to all.