In 1995, an elderly unnamed widow is moving into an Oregon nursing home on the urging of her controlling son, Julien, a surgeon. Hannah’s new novel is an homage to the extraordinary courage and endurance of Frenchwomen during World War II. The account of the assassination attempt and its nail-biting aftermath is brilliantly suspenseful.īinet deserves great kudos for retrieving this fateful, half-forgotten episode, spotlighting Nazi infamy, celebrating its resisters, and delivering the whole with panache. They are embedded with the Czech resistance while they plan tactics. The arrival of these modest yet extraordinary patriots is like the first hint of dawn after a pitch-black night. He needed a coup to restore the morale of the Czech anti-Nazis. The assassination, dubbed Operation Anthropoid, was the brainchild of Beneš, head of the Czech government-in-exile in London. This monster was Himmler’s deputy in the SS (the goofy title refers to the belief that he was also Himmler’s brain) and the principal architect of the Final Solution. He convincingly profiles Heydrich, aka the Blond Beast and the Hangman of Prague.
He excoriates the spinelessness of the British and French governments in acceding to Hitler’s takeover of Czechoslovakia. Yet in fact he does a good job of putting the assassination in a geopolitical context. He retracts some of his assertions he regrets his inadequacy as a historian. “I’ve been talking rubbish,” he exclaims. Like all amateurs, he makes mistakes disarmingly, he admits them. Binet’s alter ego narrator is a zealous amateur historian. “Two men have to kill a third man.” Simple, no? But the narration is not. His projected assassination is Binet’s story, and Heydrich’s would-be assassins (Gabcík the Slovak and Kubiš the Czech) are Binet’s heroes. This is Heydrich in Prague in 1942: the Nazi Protector of Bohemia and Moravia, supremely powerful, supremely vulnerable. He is feared and loathed by passersby, yet he has no bodyguard. Picture a man being driven to work in an open-top car, taking the same route every day.
The evergreen allure of Nazis as the embodiment of evil is what drives this French author’s soul-stirring work: a hybrid of fact and meta-fiction that won the Prix Goncourt in 2010.
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