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This year we’re going to list every book we read, and hot damn this is a great beginning.

We don’t even know how to say the title, an abbreviation of Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich (“Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich”), but from the very first page we know we are in for something original and funny. Later it is quite moving. HHhH (Ash Ash ash Ash?) by Laurent Binet, English translation by Sam Taylor, is a book about the Nazi general Reinhard Heydrich’s rise to power, about the plan by the Czech government-in-exile to assassinate him, and about the process of writing such a book.

Binet grapples with the oxymoron that is historical fiction, with the inherent fakery of putting words in the mouths of dead people (to say nothing of the disrespect), with truth and knowability, with the inadequacy of words. How can you do justice to heroism? What can you say to people who give up their lives to fight evil? How can you turn historical persons into characters for your own literary purposes?

HHhH is probably too clever by half, and many readers will be annoyed by the frequent authorial intrusions, but it is undeniably a thrilling and audacious work. Binet doesn’t just blow the dust off history, he blasts it off.

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First paragraphs:

Gabcik—that’s his name—really did exist. Lying alone on a little iron bed, did he hear, from outside, beyond the shutters of a darkened apartment, the unmistakable creaking of the Prague tramways? I want to believe so. I know Prague well, so I can imagine the tram’s number (but perhaps it’s changed?), its route, and the place where Gabcik waits, thinking and listening. We are at the corner of Vysehradska and Trojicka. The number 18 tram (or the number 22) has stopped in front of the Botanical Gardens. We are, most important, in 1942. In The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera implies that he feels a bit ashamed at having to name his characters. And although this shame is hardly perceptible in his novels, which are full of Tomases, Tominas, and Terezas, we can intuit the obvious meaning: what could be more vulgar than to arbitrarily give—from a childish desire for verisimilitude or, at best, mere convenience—an invented name to an invented character? In my opinion, Kundera should have gone further: what could be more vulgar than an invented character?

So, Gabcik existed, and it was to this name that he answered (although not always). His story is as true as it is extraordinary. He and his comrades are, in my eyes, the authors of one of the greatest acts of resistance in human history, and without doubt the greatest of the Second World War…