This is a bad novel but an interesting book. The author wrestles with how to get at the truth of an event and the people involved without making them into puppets. He's at his best when he forgets this and breathes life into his characters. He's at his worst when he quibbles over the color of a car. A scrupulous devotion to fact often prevents him from writing the truth. ( )

HHhH
Laurent Binet
Publicado: 2009 | 248 páginas
Novela Histórico

«HHhH».Tras este misterioso título se esconde la frase en alemán «Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich»: «el cerebro de Himmler se llama Heydrich». Esto es lo que se decía en las SS de Reinhard Heydrich, jefe de la Gestapo, considerado el hombre más peligroso del Tercer Reich y una de las figuras más enigmáticas del nazismo. En 1942, dos miembros de la Resistencia aterrizan en paracaídas en Praga con la misión de asesinarlo. Después del atentado, se refugian en una iglesia, donde, delatados por un traidor y acorralados por setecientos hombres de las SS, se suicidan. Laurent Binet narra uno de los episodios más conmovedores de la Segunda Guerra Mundial y, posiblemente, de la Historia de la humanidad. Pero tras la narración de esta hazaña empieza otra lucha: la que enfrenta la ficción con la realidad. HHhH es el relato de la desesperada búsqueda de una forma precisa de contar la Historia. Para ello Binet lleva al lector hasta la tormenta de la Segunda Guerra Mundial, a Berlín, Londres y París, a la Praga actual, y en un giro literario de una fuerza inaudita, traslada el régimen nazi hasta el 2009.

A clever and moving, self-examining novelization of the assassination of Heydrich - translated from French. Highly recommended. ( )

What makes HHhH so powerful is that it is essentially a morality play. Would the crimes perpetrated by Heydrich and the Nazis be as horrific if not juxtaposed with the courage and idealism of the Czech parachuters? Binet writes this as a non-fiction novel, in which he is a character, struggling with his purpose and emotional responses to the events. He calls out the French and British appeasement strategy at Munich as cowardly, a historical truth that gains force when we learn, intimately, the immediate consequences of this cowardice.

We are forgetting this dark period of our history. I knew nothing about Heydrich or the destruction of Lidice. We have neo-Nazis and their apologists on the rise in American society. Killing Heydrich was necessary, according to Binet, to give the Czech people a shred of dignity in the face of absolute subjugation. ( )

Hmmmm, a hard one to rate. At times I loved this book, especially at the start and the climactic scenes towards the end. I liked the narrative technique: the switching between the story, and the story of the story. But... there were many times I wanted to give the author a good slap. He can be quite charming in the way he admits that he's never had any really significant setbacks or difficulties in his life, but despite this self-admitted academic cocoon he has no hesitation in applying 100% hindsight to abuse those who did have to make awful decisions in the late 1930s and failed to be psychic about the full Nazi agenda, or to make every decision with Czech interests first (even if they weren't Czechs). Even worse, there is a nasty and racist anti-German undertone in the book, beyond anti-Nazism - the German-speaking proportion of Czechoslovakia's population is called 'gangrenous' at one point - which would be ironic if it wasn't so distasteful. ( )