Round
7th’s judge was Jack Hitt who writes for the New York
Times Magazine, the New Yorker, and Rolling Stone.
He
read and compared HHhH
by Laurent Binet and Bring Up
The Bodies by Hilary Mantel
Both
books are works of historical fiction based on true events.
HHhH
is set in World War Two and is all about two Czechoslovakian parachutists who
were sent on mission by London
to assassinate Reinhard Heydrich, chief of the Nazi secret services. His
boss is Heinrich Himmler; everyone in the SS says 'Himmler's brain is called
Heydrich', which in German spells "HHhH".
Bring
Up The Bodies is Hilary Mantel’s second Man Booker Prize winning historical
novel about Thomas Cromwell. In this book, he watches as Henry VIII falls in
love with Jane Seymour whilst still married to Anne Boleyn.
Neither
books hold any interest for me but they have been hugely popular over the last
year so ignoring my negative point of view, let’s see what Jack had to say on
them and who went through from this round.
Starting
with HHhH, the book is written as fiction but has a lots of facts throughout
the book that are narrated but it’s unknown if the narrator is supposed to be
the author or not. I’ll quote him here ‘The
tone of the narrator’s offstage whispers comes off, eventually, as stiffly
posed, and can range from querulous to snarking to twee. They are like those
imitators of David Foster Wallace who riddle their story with sardonic
footnotes, full of winking ironies; after a while, it just seems like a whole
lot of winking. Sometimes the narrator can sound like a sophomore in a lit
class: “Sometimes I feel like a character in a Borges story.”
Even
the weedy issues of how to tell the story persistently emerge amid its shards.
At one point, the narrator reads a novel related to his story and marvels at a
blunt transition sentence that reads, “1920 had just begun.” The narrator adds,
“I think that’s brilliant.” A few pages later, a riff on Heydrich’s early life
ends, “It is November 9, 1918.”
But
in the guts of this story is a breathtaking thriller and we never get to be
simply seized by the details of it.
It’s
as close to a true heroic epic as there ever could be, and yet the snarky
rhetorical apostrophes about history are, finally, frustrating, because some
part of any reader yearns to be seduced by story.’
As
for Bring up The Bodies, he was lured in from the beginning by the story itself
to the way she can shape a sentence such as this one ‘He is not a man wedded to
action, Boleyn, but rather a man who stands by, smirking and stroking his
beard; he thinks he looks enigmatic, but instead he looks as if he's pleasuring
himself’,
He
felt he wasn’t distracted by worrying about the facts of the story and was
seduced by the way Hilary Mantel writes.
So,
not surprisingly, Bring Up The Bodies won this round.
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