Abstract:
In Laurent Binet’s alternative historical novel entitles HHhH, published in French in 2010 and translated into English in 2013, the writer takes his readers beyond the historical facts of a particular event in the past, Operation Authropoid, to his own life as a French writer faced with the burden of his personal history and the perpetual struggle with the unattainability of historical truth. In this article, I propose that Binet’s conscious “otherness” to Central Europe , particularly the Czech and Slovak languages, cultures, and histories, set him “free to dream” of a different place/time and to imagine as well as introduce specters of the obscure and unknown “subaltern” in history, thereby adding critical dimensions to the critical rethinking and re(-)membering of the Czech and Slovak histories of violence and dissidence.
