View shared 18

Let's start with what there is positive. The documentation work and research Laurent Binet was colossal. He reviewed a wide variety of sources, some famous, some very confidential, to find historical material for his novel. I know well enough, but I learned many details about individuals that have made the story tells Laurent Binet, whether of Czech resistance fighters, both heroic and amateur politicians of Democracies generally cowards and unconscious, or Nazi officials whose personality is always a surprising mix of incongruity and inhumanity, moral weakness, meanness and fearlessness ("capacity" of the Nazis treat the shares under the most inhumane purely technical angle is and will remain for me a subject of perpetual stupor). Moreover, Laurent Binet like Prague, venue of most of the action of his work, and he knows the city well. As Schliemann on the ruins of Troy, he walked in the footsteps of the characters he narrates the life. He manages to convey this love is indisputable, and immerse ourselves in the atmosphere of Prague occupied with consummate novelist of talent.

Above all, Laurent Binet managed to extract self-righteous attitude which merely condemn without the horror to face the fact that the ability of human beings to wander in error and evil is simply endless. Another great courage Laurent Binet: he dares to expose the Nazis themselves, be they ordinary soldiers of the Einsatzgruppen, SS officers or officials of the regime themselves were horrified by the regime of extermination of shares the breaking point and sink into alcohol, drugs or substantially folly. The presentation of this reality helps break the usual Manichaeism that instead of one side of the inhuman Nazi, barbaric and cruel and the world, always gracious and animated the best feelings of the other. It shows the history of the Second World War is in fact that of an infinite complexity is evident resistant betraying the Nazis to the enemy, double agents, triple, that Himmler gave the order but vanishes before a mass execution. In short, it manages to avoid the curse that teaches nothing, and in this, the novel by Laurent Binet is a successful balancing exercise.

By cons, Laurent Binet does not know German, which leads him to make a foul language almost every time he uses a German term: women become men, the singular plural. After so much research work, he could be read by a German specialist in the period, especially since he is asking the questions that all historians have placed before him on the right method to be used in research history. How to establish a fact? What share should we leave to intuition that creates intimacy with its subject in historical writing? This questioning is healthy, but was it necessary to devote so many pages to procrastination Laurent Binet, in his hesitation to admit or deny the historicity of an event? was it necessary to give us concerns about the possible reception of the work by Marjane Satrapi, by his half-brother or his companion of the moment? Often HHhH becomes a narcissistic narrative meditations actually quite flat Laurent Binet on the historical work (really, we lack Bloch!). Who read one of the many philosophers have posed questions about the methods of the historian can not complete many tirelessly pages of the work of Laurent Binet.

Finally in this novel pierces the intellectual universe of Laurent Binet: his communist father fashionable from 1950-1960 (but beware communist crimes, such as the fact that the Red Army remained grounded arms while! wretched inhabitants of Warsaw rebelled against the Nazi occupiers are themselves ignored, and Soviet Communism remains a subject of affectionate nostalgia), the mentality of small teacher of Education, which has not paid its adolescent conflict with authority and implement it in its opposition to his minister (page 277), pro domo pleas for "the honorable corporation" professors of Education (not private, horribile dictu), the stupid belief that drives him to say that subversion is a good in itself, the conviction that "sport is a beautiful fucking fascist" (page 277 yet) - thank you for Pierre de Coubertin! - The teenager references to "Inrocks" and Enki Bilal, idle observation that "the bosses are always obsessed with the performance of their workers," all this denotes the little official who protected his life n ' knew that the school, and never exercised responsibility towards its employees, suppliers or customers. This Weltanschauung corporatist official gives the novel by Laurent Binet immature tone that annoys, page after page, and that spoils documentation work and writing that otherwise would have been an excellent novel.