HHhH Audiobook

HHhH: "Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich," or "Himmler's brain is called Heydrich." The most dangerous man in Hitler's cabinet, Reinhard Heydrich was known as the "Butcher of Prague." He was feared by all and loathed by most. 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.

Who were these men, arguably two of the most discreet heroes of the twentieth century? In Laurent Binet's captivating debut novel, we follow Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubiš from their dramatic escape of Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia to England; from their recruitment to their harrowing parachute drop into a war zone, from their stealth attack on Heydrich's car to their own brutal death in the basement of a Prague church.

A seemingly effortlessly blend of historical truth, personal memory, and Laurent Binet's remarkable imagination, HHhH—an international bestseller and winner of the prestigious Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman—is a work at once thrilling and intellectually engrossing, a fast-paced novel of the Second World War that is also a profound meditation on the nature of writing and the debt we owe to history.

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"The past is not only a foreign country, but it is inaccessible. There is no way to know it. Sure, one can read a book and find out who is who and what happened, but one cannot get into the heads of those people and the feelings they experienced, not only in the best, most quotidian days, but right before the gas chamber, or right after the assassination of a monster, a butcher, an architect of the Holocaust, goes south and not as planned. For history is not a book: one can't plan it. One can't have the characters you want come in at the right time and say the right things and make everything better and happily ever after. There are contingencies and exigencies. There are auspicious meetings and bad turns of luck. But if you are in WWII and your mission is to kill a Nazi, a most important Nazi, you have to plan it as if it weren't messy life anyway. What else can you do? You know you might die. You know you might fail. But history is merciless. Time is merciless. If you don't do what you're supposed to, history and time will make sure that thousands if not millions die. This is a novel about the writing of a historical novel. The narrator is a present day French teacher obsessed with Reinhard Heydrich, the head of the SD and the Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, number two in the SS behind Himmler. Specifically, our teacher is obsessed with his assassination, carried out by British trained Resistance fighters,one Slovakian and one Czech. He sets out to honor them, these two heroes, but as this is his first time writing a historical novel, he gets bogged down by the history. One rule he does not want to follow, a convention of the genre is to imagine his characters. Everything will be real and accurate. Well, as he writes, he encounters problems with that rule--first, not everything is known. Not only what happened but how people felt about it and what they said. How can these things be known? The past is foreign country and one that is inaccessible. And the past is sometime boring. It's not the grandeur he wants, so sometimes he makes up better dialogue. Or he tries for an art that is made up but gets at a core truth. He finds out about the paradox of art: lying in order to reveal a larger truth. And he tells us all of this, tells us what he's thinking, how he's writing, his problems, his solutions, while he tells us this incredible moving tale. The result is both an exciting true story of heroism and a meta, inside-baseball account of the telling of it."

— JS (5 out of 5 stars)