I want to return for a moment to Binet’s struggles with speculating about Heydrich’s physical reaction to a particular piece of bad news. Reinhard Heydrich was the perfect man for the job. They were men who wanted to have power over people and dreamed up creative ways to hurt them, but even among them, Hitler had to look for a man cold and calloused enough to exterminate legions. The Nazi party attracted the outcasts, the angry, the perverted, and the brilliantly demented. He acquired many more nicknames once he found his home in the Nazi party: ”the Hangman, the butcher, the Blond Beast, and-this one given by Adolf Hitler himself-the Man with the Iron heart.” The question is, did his childish tormentors create him or did they sense on some feral level that he was going to be the architect of something evil? No one could have guessed the magnitude of the holocaust that he was going to unleash. The anger against humanity could have begun there. He was called ‘the goat’ due to his appearance and his awkward sounding voice. Of course, Binet doesn’t know exactly how Heydrich may have reacted to a piece of bad news, but he does know that, given what he has read about him, more than likely anger, dark consuming anger, is the only way that someone, especially as disturbed and self-absorbed as Heydrich, could react.

Oscar Wilde has that famous quote regarding this exact predicament: “I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. He sheepishly deletes the line, but then later in the day he puts it back in because every other line he tries to replace it with lacks. ”When she reaches the second sentence, she exclaims: ‘What do you mean, “the blood rises to his cheeks and he feels his brain swell inside his skull”? You’re making it up!’” She is involved in the process to call him to task whenever he breaks one of his own rules about writing historical fiction. His girlfriend Natacha reads the chapters as he writes them. Was Heydrich riding in a forest green car or was it black? Does it matter? Binet shares with us the concerns he has with taking too many liberties with what is known truth and what are his reasonable speculations. Laurent Binet is writing about the assassination of the Nazi Reinhard Heydrich and the men who killed him in Prague. This is a book with a plot ensnared in the arduous process of conceiving a historical novel. I don’t know how to describe him any other way except that he has a punchable face.

Or rather, in the words of my brother-in-law, with whom I’ve discussed all this: It’s like planting false proof at a crime scene where the floor is already strewn with incriminating evidence. ”This is what I think: inventing a character in order to understand historical facts is like fabricating evidence.

Hhhh laurent binet