Biography

Laurent Binet is 37 years old. He was born in Paris. He completed his military service in Slovakia and has divided his time between Paris and Prague for several years. Associate of Arts, he taught French in Seine-Saint-Denis for ten years and was a lecturer at the University. HHHH was awarded the Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman 2010.

"Two Czechoslovak parachutists sent from London are charged with assassinating Reinhard Heydrich, head of the Gestapo, the Nazi intelligence chief planner of the Final Solution, the protector of Bohemia and Moravia, dubbed "the executioner", "the blond beast", "the most dangerous man of the Third Reich." After months of preparation, he was finally shot dead in his Mercedes. There follows a mad hunt that ends in a church in central Prague. HHHH is an acronym coined by the SS in German which means "the brain of Himmler is called Heydrich" (Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich).

The story is structured like a funnel: the short chapters recount different episodes in different places and at different times, all of which converge on Prague where the attack took place. All the characters in this book actually existed or still exist. The author reported the facts as accurately as possible but had to resist the temptation to romanticize. How to relate History? This question sometimes leads the author to set a stage to realize the conditions of his writing, his research, his hesitations. Historical truth is revealed both as a neurotic obsession and an endless quest." (Introduction by the editor)

Kubi is dead. I regret having to write that. I would have liked to know him better. I would have liked to have saved him. It appears from the evidence that at the end of the gallery there was an unused door which communicated with neighboring buildings, which could have allowed the three men to escape. Why didn't they it use ! History is the only true fate: it can be read in every sense but one can not rewrite it. Whatever I do, whatever I say, I can not raise him Jan Kubi the brave, heroic Jan Kubi, the man who killed Heydrich. I took absolutely no pleasure in telling this tale which took me many long weeks to write, and for what?

"A puzzling story to tell the execution, by the resistance of the SS Reinhard Heydrich, the planner of the Final Solution ... For the author, the problem remains whole: how to evoke one of the worst bastards in history without one way or another, glorifying him ? This issue, morally essential, Laurent Binet asks himself throughout the 400 pages of his (excellent) first novel. It is to his credit ... Laurent Binet proceeds by return trips in time and space, between personal reflections and historical documents, composing little by little a puzzle from which emerges an increasingly clearer picture of what took place that day, and a few faces ..." (Bernard Loupias, Le Nouvel Observateur, January 28, 2010).