Laurent Binet: HHhH

[Liam]

I doubt I'll be reading this book, though it definitely sounds less offensive/overblown than Jonathan Littell's The Kindly Ones, but I thought I'd open up a thread on it after having read James Wood's beautifully written and very perceptive review. In his opinion, the novel falls apart under the weight of its own expectations.

[pesahson]

I remember hearing about this book when it first came out in France and got awarded with Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman. The story of assassination of Heydrich is fascinating to me and I was really looking forward to the Polish translation which came out some time ago. I eventually passed on this one after reading some not-so-flattering reviews. I'll probably won't go out of my way to read it, but if I stumbled across it in a library, I'd give it a go.

[Eric]

I don't want to read this book. I think people would do better reading the real history of Himmler and Heydrich, from real history books. This looks like a kind of war thriller based on fact. We are now entering the era where most people who participated in the Second World War have died of old age, so people start fantasising about what could have happened, or turning history into an adventure tale. I love it when the Amazon plug says:

With his cold Aryan features and implacable cruelty, Heydrich seemed indestructible—until two men, a Slovak and a Czech recruited by the British secret service, killed him in broad daylight on a bustling street in Prague, and thus changed the course of History.

"Aryan features"? Has the reviewer ever seen a photo of Heydrich en profile? Is "Aryan" a legitimate way of describing features anyway, if you're not going to fall into the trap of aping Nazi terminology? It was indeed a Czech and a Slovak who succeeded in kiliing Heydrich, even though they were recruited by the Brits; whether the inhabitants of Lidice thought the assassination was worth it is another matter.

[Liam]

Why Is Everyone Reviewing HHhH?

The Missing Pages of Laurent Binet’s HHhH

[Liam]

And here's the fetching young lady herself:

[leyla]

Here's my review of it. What perplexes me is why it was ever sold as a fictional book. Binet spends some lf the time griping about people who embellish history in order to create historical fiction. So the obvious thing would have been for him to write a history book. Maybe only fiction was eligible for the Prix Goncourt, which he won. Anyhow, my review in the Indy on Sun a few weeks ago was q harsh on Binet because of his adolescent huffing about how his way was the only way, but actually, I was tranfixed by this book. By the true history, I should add, not the rest of it. Binet writes well, he creates tension, and the fact that it's almost all real makes it far more compelling for me than if he had fictionalised some characters and had them in there. The real story is quite horrific amd extraordinary enough, it needs no decoration.



http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/books/reviews/hhhh-by-laurent-binet-trs-by-sam-taylor-7791200.html

[Liam]

...actually, I was tranfixed by this book...

I had the same experience with Jonathan Franzen's Freedom, Leyla: I was ready to hate it from the beginning because of its wordiness, but I ended up being utterly transfixed by the force of its narrative.

Congratulations on the review!

[Eric]

I think that this book relies on the fact that a growing number of people are too young to know anything about WWII. I like historical fiction when you examine things at a safe distance, but the Lidice and Heydrich events are not far enough back. They should still be examined through the prism of history. WWII is still too recent, and I don't feel that Binet is doing much more than picking one of the many mass murderers of history and cashing in on him. I repeat, with WWII still being in living memory, but many young people uneducated with regard to history, we are in an uncomfortable middle period between vivid memory and oblivion.

[Daniel del Real]

The book was interesting to me as I'm a fan of WWII related topics. However, it is a total failure in almost every aspect that integrates a decent narrative. The mixture of fiction & history, along with the "how I, the author, got to wrote the book" technique, comes up as a total mess with very unpleasant results. None of what he tries gets accomplished: The historical aspects gets shadowed by a very poor command of the research and the investigation, the fiction gets contaminated by the history as he tries to combine them and the prose gets heavily lacerated by both. At the end, it's a collage without form, with no particular achievements in any field and with just a few interesting facts to highlight.


Interesting he mentions Jonathan Littell several times, most of the times to criticize him. Haven't read Littell, not planning to, but I don't see what's the point of doing it. He's got a lot to do mending his own mistakes. It seems that he tried to copy Vila-Matas style telling the gestation of the fictional work, but with very poor results.

[Eric]

I avoid fiction that is heavily based on the most murderous and genocidal episodes of WWII. I was born less than a decade after the war, in which my father fought, and do not want to read the works of armchair wannabes, who have just raked together stuff out of books and films to construct their own derivative bestseller. Those of us who have heard about WWII from people who were actually there, don't need to read souped-up accounts of violence and horror, cobbled together by young opportunists who think that now all the old dodderers who were there are dead, they can muscle in and exploit the narrative for their own ends.

This is yet another instance of how the book industry is exploiting gullible young readers with shock, awe and sensation, not to enlighten, but to make profits. Why so many of you fall for the hype is something I do not know.

Read a history book.

[leyla]

Liam, thank you!
Eric, the thing is, Binet has done himself a disservice by billing this book as fiction. I can't understand why he's labelled it thus since he spends so much time griping about what a cop- out fictionalising history is. Apart from the many interjections about his own feelings and his sneering at other people's books and films on the subject, it reads almost like a history book. The only thing missing is references. I think Binet wants to have his cake and eat it - he moans about how historical fiction is lazy but he labels his own book as historical fiction. He slates other authors for fictionalising history and decrees that he will deal only in facts, but then he blatantly uses supposition - people's expressions, the colour of Heydrich when he arrived in hospital, etc. And he gives no references, which, for a history book is ridiculous - how are we meant to verify or believe what he says? It's almost as if by having an early chapter where a friend assumes he's made facts up and he has to explain that he hasn't, he tries to bully us into accepting that all his other statements are well documented fact. And yet, having said that, the history really is so horrific that it is compelling. Eric mentions the village of Lidice, where the inhabitants were slaughtered as revenge for the attack on H despite their having no link to the assassination. It's these real events that are chilling. The book is not fiction, it is fact but with an intrusive narrator inserted, and a few assumptions made about facts that no one could possibly know. But the main events are well documented and are quite horrific, so anyone who finds true history interesting may be fascinated by HHhH.

[Eric]

The bottom line is. he's read it all in books and it's too recent to be decent. His next novel will no doubt be about the Armenian Massacre by the Turks, then one about the fascists in Argentina and Chile, but he will no doubt forget the millions who were sent to the GuLag in Russia, because that isn't personal enough and there was no Zyklon-B used. He looks to me like the classic hyped opportunist. He should be given no quarter.

[pesahson]

The bottom line is. he's read it all in books and it's too recent to be decent. His next novel will no doubt be about the Armenian Massacre by the Turks, then one about the fascists in Argentina and Chile, but he will no doubt forget the millions who were sent to the GuLag in Russia, because that isn't personal enough and there was no Zyklon-B used. He looks to me like the classic hyped opportunist. He should be given no quarter.

Oh, please. Aren't you getting too worked up about a book you haven't even read?? You don't have to like it, it seems like it isn't really good (judging by the reviews of Leyla and Daniel who DID read it) but pretending to know someone's motivations for writing a book is just silly.

[leyla]

Yes, Eric, Pesahon has a good point. While I respect your opinions I do think you're jumping to conclusions about Binet. He actually covers the history very well. I think my review of it was harsh because of all the books I've read in the past month, it's the one that's haunted me the most. It takes skill to relate history in a compelling way, and Binet does that. If he had kept out his forays into his own feelings it would be a stunning book. I don't know why I have more stringent criteria for some books. I think it might be that mediocre books don't ignite any very strong feelings, so it's easier to mention their quite good points and recommend them mildly. But books that are shocking and powerful but marred by a single authorial quirk, like this one, are so near great that I unleash more of my acid tongue on them. This book is certainly worth reading for anyone who is interested in history. I also don't q understand the argument that recent history is by definition harder to render interesting. My thought is that the converse is probably true; that when relatives of those directly affected exist, the history is more alive. The gulags in Russia are indeed a shocking subject worthy of being related but they were not significantly less 'recent' than WW2. And Martin Amis covered them admirably in Koba and House of Meetings.

[Eric]

You are both quite right. I have not read the book. But I did flick through it in the bookshop, and it seems to have pace, etc., with short chapters if I remember rightly.

What I don't like about even the idea of this book is that it smacks of opportunism. While Israelis, in the real-life Jew world, are having scores of rockets fired at them every day in present-day Israel, this youngish author has chosen a Nazi horror subject that has been lying around for about 70 years. It used to be the province of young Americans to highlight horrors from the Holocaust, told to them by their grandparents. But since Jonathan Littell, French authors too have sensed that they can make fame and money out of the Holocaust.

Both the Holocaust & pogroms and the GuLags & Stalinist purges have plenty authors who were actually there, lost loved ones, were traumatised, some even committing suicide after a long period of time because of their inability to excise memories of horror from their brains (e.g. Primo Levi, Paul Celan). And Solzhenitsyn, Appelfeld, Rybakov, Grossman, etc., wrote reams of semi-fictional material - and many of those describing both the Communist Russian and Nazi German inhumanity were Jews.

People are free (at least in the West) to read - or not read - what they like. My parents met via a family, the husband of which survived Auschwitz (which I actually visited, by the way, in the 1970s). So obviously I know what went on in the death camps, and what emotionally lobotomised murderers the Nazis were. And because of my translations from Estonian, and the Anne Applebaum non-fiction book, I have a clear enough picture of what slave labour and systematic murder entailed in Russia as well.

So I don't want to read an account of such events where the hidden agenda is not really kosher, so to speak.

And why on Earth should we read Martin Amis when it comes to the GuLags, when there are so many other accounts, written either by people who were there, or people like Anne Applebaum (Jewish, American, Democrat, married to the Foreign Minister of Poland)?

For me, fiction must be a sophisticated and complex blend of fiction with as much fact as is necessary for the subject matter. The narration is the key thing. But as people are so ignorant of the real-life history of Europe, some of these fictionalised dramatisations of things do not necessarily enlighten. They are calculated to entertain, using shock effects and other theatrical devices. If we are to learn from history, it mustn't be turned into shocking entertainment with a sprinkling of moralism.

[Liam]

why on Earth should we read Martin Amis when it comes to the GuLags

You're right, we shouldn't, unless we want to, .

But Eric, you can hardly fault a writer for choosing a topic that truly interested him and provided real inspiration for his book: that's like saying, How dare J. R. R. Tolkien write about hobbits? Well, he wrote about hobbits because he wanted to write about hobbits, and that's that.

And you are free either to read what he wrote, or not read it.

While I understand your misgivings about Binet's choice of subject-matter, I doubt he knew well in advance how (relatively) popular his book would become: no first-time author has that knowledge. Many of us don't even know if our book will be published in the first place.

I'm going to exercise my right to freedom and individual choice and NOT read Binet because nothing I've heard so far about either him or his novel has piqued my interest, but accusing the author blindly of opportunism, as you have, smacks of arrogance. It's like you've sat down in the same room with him and psychoanalyzed him and are now presenting a medical report.

People were writing about WWII during and immediately following WWII--call it opportunism or the need to exorcise our demons by taking them head on. Hans Keilson wrote his Jewish-themed book, Comedy in a Minor Key, in 1947. Elizabeth Bowen wrote about the London blitz in The Heat of the Day (1949). And yes, they lived through the war, and witnessed it with their own eyes, and wrote fiction about it; so why shouldn't later generations do the same thing?

I basically agree with you that Binet is more-or-less worthless, and I won't be reading him myself, but I'm not comfortable with people telling writers what they should or shouldn't, can or can't write about. A writer can and must write about anything and everything; it is up to you as a reader to decide whether or not you will pursue this individual writer's work.

[Stiffelio]

Eric, aren't you being a bit extreme? It seems to me you are rejecting the concept of fiction as such. Of course fiction's purpose is above all to entertain. If not why read any novel at all? You mentioned Amis's account of the Gulags and that you shouldn't bother reading it because he didn't suffer through it and therefore he'd be ill qualified to write about it, etc, etc. With that criterion, should we also avoid reading War and Peace because there was no way Tolstoy could have conveyed to us a deeply felt account of the Napoleanic Wars, which occured more than 50 years before he wrote it?

[leyla]

Yes, I agree with Liam and Stiffelio. Also, Binet has NOT fictionalised and sensationalised WW2 for his book. The book is mis- billed as fiction. It isn't fiction. It's a history book in which the story has been brought to vivid life but it also contains musings from the author about his own feelings about all sorts of things from Prague to the Nazis to the role of fiction in historical accounts. Interestingly, the longer this discussion goes on, the more inclined I am to defend him, so that on reading Liam's comments, I agreed with everything except I wanted to urge him 'No no, DO read it.' How odd, since I was critical of the book in my review. I guess we don't always realise the impact a book is going to have on us. This book will stay with me for a long time. As a purely historical account, it is pretty mesmerising.