I’ve just finished “HHhH” by Laurent Binet, and it was wonderfully good. Not a novel for everyone though.
“HHhH” is a fictional narrative of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the “butcher of Prague”. The Nazi protectorate of Czechoslovakia. Binet simply fictionalises the history of the assassination, but the novel is almost autobiographical as the author himself takes on the narrative of telling the story. Binet visits the locations in Prague where the assassins hid. Where they were holed up until their death. Binet pores over photos of Heydrich. Binets looks closely at this cultured killer. Binet gets deeply under the skin of the assassins, Gabcik and Kubis almost taking on their personalities. He becomes an author obsessed with thinking about his characters. What they smelt like, what they were thinking, their lives, their mission and it all works really, really well. It’s a simple novel in its structure. Some might think it would be better just to read a non-fiction account of the occupation of Czechoslovakia and the assassination and I almost partly agree. Yet, this novel seems to contain so much more human passion about the events than any non-fiction book could.
A good read.