Book Club Guide

HHhH

by Laurent Binet · 2010 · Literary Fiction

Key themes

The ethics of fictionalising real history — and the historian's guilt
Operation Anthropoid as a genuine act of heroism worth recording honestly
The narrator who keeps interrupting the story to doubt it

About this book

The story of Operation Anthropoid — the assassination of Reinhard Heydrich, head of the SS, by Czech and Slovak resistance fighters in 1942 — is interrupted constantly by the narrator's self-questioning about the ethics and limitations of fictionalising real historical events. Binet's Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman winner is both a WWII thriller and a radical meditation on historical fiction.

Published in French in 2010, HHhH won the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman. Binet spent ten years on it. He has described it as an attempt to write a historical novel while confessing his inability to write a historical novel.

Discussion questions

Binet constantly stops the narrative to question his own choices — wondering whether he's invented too much, whether he can know what Heydrich felt, whether fiction is the right form. What does this self-interruption achieve — and does it become tiresome?
Heydrich was one of the most powerful and most feared men in Nazi Germany. How does Binet develop his character — as monster, as man, or as something harder to contain?
The Czechoslovak soldiers Jan Kubiš and Jozef Gabčík are the novel's heroes. How does Binet develop their bravery — and does he avoid heroic clichés?
The title 'HHhH' stands for 'Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich' — 'Himmler's brain is called Heydrich.' What does this phrase say about how the Nazi hierarchy understood itself?
The novel is a meditation on the limits of historical fiction. Does it resolve the problem it raises — or does its formal restlessness simply perform the dilemma without solving it?