Listen to me about this book. It is awfully good, and I am going to recommend it to you very highly. I am going to highly recommend it in spite of:

1. Nazi brutality; and
2. Translated (from French)

Never mind about the grammar of that list. Just understand that it is a list of two things I am unfond of. I read HHhH because I got a copy for free from a coworker and finished my other book on the subway. And also because I picked HHhH to win the Tournament of Books (it did not), and I felt an obligation to it for that reason. I did not expect to feel fond of it. I also did not expect that in the eventuality of my loving it, I would have any difficulty in describing to other people why I loved it so much. The reason for that is you can’t put “dear sweet book” into the same sentence with “assassination of a Nazi spymaster”. I mean you can. But it looks disingenuous and denies the emotional oomf the book has.

The beginning: The narrator’s father tells him a story about a Czech and a Slovak who killed Himmler’s right-hand man, Reinhard Heydrich.

The end (not spoilers, just history): Some brave people died, and you wish they had not.

The whole: HHhH (affiliate links: Amazon, B&N, Book Depository) is the dearest book about Nazi officers that ever I have read, though admittedly it did not face much competition. It is the story of Reinhard Heydrich, the Butcher of Prague and one of the architects of the Final Solution, and of the two men who assassinated him and were later killed by Nazi soldiers. Binet is not writing fiction, exactly, though he calls the book a novel–everything he writes about Reinhard Heydrich and the men who killed him is true.

Everyone finds it normal, fudging reality to make a screenplay more dramatic, or adding coherence to the narrative of a character whose real path probably included too many random ups and downs, insufficiently loaded with significance. It’s because of people like that, forever messing with historical truth just to sell their stories, that an old friend, familiar with all these fictional genres and therefore fatally accustomed to these processes of glib falsification, can say to me in innocent surprise: “Oh, really, it’s not invented?”

No, it’s not invented! What would be the point of “inventing” Nazism?

I loved the narrator’s openness. Binet’s narrator (I am trying not to assume it’s really Binet himself) talks about history the way Nicholson Baker’s Anthologist talks about poetry: generously, in full awareness of its tragedy and comedy, and admitting freely his own feelings and wishes about it. He tells stories because they are moving, and then admits he didn’t need to tell them but he just wanted to. He refuses to buy a book (Heydrich’s wife’s memoirs) that he thinks might humanize Heydrich, except that in a later section he says off-handedly that he bought the book after all. In one chapter he sneers at a scholar for getting an easy detail wrong, and two chapters on, he remarks that actually that writer was quite correct and he was wrong.

Some reviews I’ve seen of HHhH have said that they found the narrator fussy. He does fret a lot and openly about the veracity and manner of his storytelling. But luckily this is one of those books where you can probably tell right away whether you’ll like it or not, because the way the writing is at the beginning is exactly the way it is all the way through. For me it was perfect. When I read historical fiction, I tend to fret about what’s real and what’s invented, and I live for the notes at the end that tell you what is what. Binet draws back the authorial curtain to reveal his own anxiety about the perils and pitfalls of converting history into fiction, and I loved it.

Oh, I don’t know what to say about this book. I loved it. You should please read it and then comment on this post or email me to tell me how much you loved it.

Edit to add: The lovely Jackie of Farm Lane Books informed me that Binet’s publisher redacted references Binet made to Jonathan Littell’s book The Kindly Ones, a fictional memoir of an aged SS officer. Evidently the passages were left out of all editions of the book, not just the English translation as I initially thought. This made me sad because the Littell references that stayed in the book charmed me to pieces; and anyway I have a grudge against The Kindly Ones for having the same title as (and being better SEO’d than) the ninth volume of Neil Gaiman’s Sandman.

As in so many other cases, we find that The Millions is there for us in the clinch. Knowing what the people would want, they published the missing pages. Hurrah! Some of these bits ended up staying in HHhH, but many were cut. Here is my favorite cut-out bit, which also encapsulates a lot of what I love about Binet’s narrator.

Yesterday, I met a young woman who works in a library. She told me about an old lady, a former Resistance fighter, who regularly borrows books. One day, the old lady took home Littell’s The Kindly Ones. Soon afterwards, she brought it back, exclaiming: “What is this shit?” When I heard this, I thought straightaway that it would require a great deal of willpower not to put this anecdote in my book.

So there you go.

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The Rehearsal is about a girls’ school rocked by a teacher-student sex scandal, and a theatre school that makes the scandal the center of its end-of-year production. Characters use the shocking events to explore their own lives and to understand how grown-ups relate to each other.

As the title of the book implies, it’s a story about rehearsing: rehearsing a play, rehearsing sexuality, rehearsing in various roles for the sort of person you’re going to become. Over the first half of the book, you see the girls’ school students rehearsing different ways to frame the scandal in their lives, and in the second half, you see the theater students rehearsing how to frame it on a stage. The book sets up a number of quite elegant parallels and gets at something quite fundamental about adolescence: that thing that you are always doing of trying on personas to see if they’ll fit you, assuming you can discard them if they don’t, but then sometimes discovering you’re stuck with something you’ve tried because it’s all anyone can see of you now. This is done exceptionally well.

The Rehearsal is one of those books I admire but do not love. Eleanor Catton brilliantly portrays what she sets out to portray, the aforementioned trying-things-on aspect of adolescence. But there are a lot of things at the book that came off very contrived. Much of the dialogue was stilted and strange, and even when it was in the mouth of strange, stilted characters, it felt too fake even to be viable as words that someone fake would say.

The problem isn’t that people don’t talk that way, although they don’t; it’s that most of the characters spend most of their time talking like normal people. When someone starts talking out loud to someone else about notes burning into them like acid holes, it’s jarring that their interlocutor doesn’t say, “You talk weird, ya weirdo”. Do whatever you want with dialogue but either make it consistent or hang a lampshade on its inconsistency. Characters I wanted to believe in would say things like notes burn into them like acid holes, and abruptly they would feel like paper dolls instead of people. I wanted the characters to have an emotional foundation, but all they seemed to have was more and more personas to try on. No there there, as they say.

To steal a phrase from Simon (though he used it about Helen Oyeyemi and was — forgive me — totally wrong), too experimental for her boots!

Other reviews are here.

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