Ambitious and cruel, Heydrich was also a master of bureaucratic maneuvering: As Binet writes, "His motto could be: Files! Files! Always more files!" He played the game of Nazi Party politics brilliantly, using his status as head of the SS's intelligence agency to spy and blackmail his way to the top. The first half of the novel focuses on Heydrich.
Binet first heard of Operation Anthropoid as a child, and "HHhH" is as much the story of Binet's lifelong obsession with the mission as it is the story of the mission itself. "HHhH" takes as its subject Operation Anthropoid, the daring 1942 military plan that saw two freedom fighters, Jozef Gabcik and Jan Kubis, parachute into Nazi-occupied territory and assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, the Nazi ruler of Bohemia and Moravia. Binet prefers to call his work an "infranovel," and this term hints at the task that the writer has set himself: to lay bare what lies beneath and within the novel form itself. "HHhH," the brilliant, haunting debut novel by the French writer Laurent Binet, is a hodgepodge of genres, blending straightforward historical fiction with postmodern metafiction, archival research and personal memoir. (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 327 pages $26)
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