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A review by docpacey
HHhH by Laurent Binet
3.0
Meta-historical 'novel', 'infranovel', facts or fiction? Binet injects his struggle with historical accuracy into the story of the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, the butcher of Prague, by Czech paratroopers in 1942.
The writing is sharp, the story is fast paced, detailed and filled with tension. It's a wonder, therefore, that Binet felt the need to inject himself so completely into it.
Binet's storytelling is crisp, and he builds the suspense nicely as the story reaches climax on the day that two protagonists await their quarry. Heydrich, in his hubris, commutes daily through occupied territory that he has subdued by mass murder, terror and enslavement, in an open car. His doom awaits at the hands of partisans, trained in England, dropped into their own country to be aided by the locals. We meet all of the major players on both sides as they move toward the inevitable collision on May 28th 1942.
The story's narrator, however, is unreliable, as he mixes, in short bursts, his own doubts about the facts he is relating, into the text.
He obsesses about the color of Heydrich's car; about the details of dialogue and whether he can trust his sources as he struggles to add details to the story he is telling.
I found the style and the meta-context to be utterly distracting to an otherwise well told tale. The ultra short chapters were an annoyance as well. As history HHhH was great, as a novel, not so much, thus 3 stars only.
The writing is sharp, the story is fast paced, detailed and filled with tension. It's a wonder, therefore, that Binet felt the need to inject himself so completely into it.
Binet's storytelling is crisp, and he builds the suspense nicely as the story reaches climax on the day that two protagonists await their quarry. Heydrich, in his hubris, commutes daily through occupied territory that he has subdued by mass murder, terror and enslavement, in an open car. His doom awaits at the hands of partisans, trained in England, dropped into their own country to be aided by the locals. We meet all of the major players on both sides as they move toward the inevitable collision on May 28th 1942.
The story's narrator, however, is unreliable, as he mixes, in short bursts, his own doubts about the facts he is relating, into the text.
He obsesses about the color of Heydrich's car; about the details of dialogue and whether he can trust his sources as he struggles to add details to the story he is telling.
I found the style and the meta-context to be utterly distracting to an otherwise well told tale. The ultra short chapters were an annoyance as well. As history HHhH was great, as a novel, not so much, thus 3 stars only.