What I Am Reading: "HHhH" by Laurent Binet

               “HHhH” is French writer Laurent Binet’s first novel, and I wanted to check it out because his second novel, “The Seventh Function of Language,” was one of my favorite books of 2017. The latter book is a postmodern mystery story framing the 1980 traffic accident death of Roland Barthes as a murder, and features a race to stop bad guys from acquiring a rhetoric-based superweapon.

               “HHhH” (the initials in German for the saying “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”) is the story of Operation Anthropoid, the commando mission by Czechoslovakian resistance fighters to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich in 1942. This novel is also postmodern – the story itself is interspersed with chapters from Binet on its writing. The novel is a labor of love for Binet, as he identifies viscerally with the assassins, Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík. He tells the sad but triumphant story of their ultimately successful mission (Heydrich ended up dying of an infection), and their eventual death in a shootout with the Nazis. The novel is also the story of Binet’s own pursuit of information on the topic. He describes it as a novel that he has to write. He devours any books available on the subject (and comments on them “in real time” in the text), travels repeatedly to Prague to research and write the story, and inflicts his obsession on his friends and loved ones (and includes their reviews and comments to him).

               Binet’s historical novel seeks to avoid many conventions of that genre. Some passages of reenactment or recreation are followed by deconstructions or denunciations of the scene that has just “taken place.” He feels cheap writing anything that he isn’t certain happened; instead he includes a dubious anecdote or an invented scene, followed by a note to disregard it. Anyone who wanted to write a historical novel would be well-advised to peruse this one first, for a deconstructive commentary on the genre.

               I like to read something French every once in a while. Though the broad outlines of French history or politics are easy to find, there are many important episodes that do not have extensive coverage from anglophone writers. A perspective on the war different from from the triumphant Anglo-American march to victory is also useful. Even though I don’t always have the background necessary to fully digest it, I appreciate the glimpses into a different paradigm that Binet provides.  I got a good laugh from:

“…putting the French back to work was the French right’s eternal fantasy. I was deeply shocked that these elitist reactionaries, understanding so little the true nature of the situation, would use the Sudeten crisis to settle their scores with the Popular Front … Just in time, however, my father reminded me that Daladier was a radical socialist, and thus part of the Popular Front. I’ve just checked this, and staggeringly it’s true: Daladier was the defense minister in Leon Blum’s government! I feel like I’ve been punched in the stomach.”

Or:

“Saint-John Perse belongs to that lineage of writer-diplomats, such as Claudel or Giraudoux, who fill me with disgust.”

Other vignettes give me cause to think, such as an interlude where Binet recounts the career of René Bousquet, a left-wing French politician who also served a stint as Vichy head of policing, and was overly solicitous in rounding up Jews for the Nazis. Largely rehabilitated in the post-war years, Bousquet was finally subject to enough scrutiny and recriminations to be facing a trial when he was assassinated in 1993. Binet says of the assassin:

“This ridiculous moron deprived us of a trial that would have been ten times more interesting than those of Papon and Barbie put together, more interesting than those of Pétain and Laval… I feel a great repulsion and mistrust for someone like Bousquet, but when I think of his assassin, of the immense historical loss that his act represents, of the revelations the trial would have produced and which he has forever denied us, I feel overwhelmed by hate. He didn’t kill any innocents, that’s true, but he is a destroyer of truth.”

Anyway: Binet’s passion serves the novel well, as does his choice of formatting. The novel tells the story of a dramatic historical episode that has been recounted elsewhere many times, but it is worth it for Binet’s asides, and his narrative voice.