Les Lauriers Du Lac De Constance

by Marie Chaix

18x11x2cm. Poche.

Genres: Fiction, French Literature, France, Literary Fiction, Literature, Novels, Historical Fiction

Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

Reviews

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lake Constance was Marie Chaix's first novel. It is formally perfect: it's ludicrous how comfortable she is out of the gate with juggling storyline threads, each knotted and twined amongst countless others, while ping-ponging between temporal leaps sometimes decades in expanse. Not only does she do this paragraph-to-paragraph when needed, those same nuzzling paragraphs will switch the POV of the speaker/spoken of between first-second-third (as well as close, limited, omnipotent, etc.) perspectives in concordance. While no definable amount of postmodernist dreck has used tricks both cheap and (eh...) less cheap (nailed it) to substitute for lacking anything original or enduring or honest to say, Chaix deploys it to mimic the whiplash that was her father's real life careering misadventures with Nazi collaborationism and subsequent time collecting Rita Hayworth posters in some of the more lugubrious hoosegows around France.

Were her authority any less total, perhaps the people that populate the book fictive rather than filial, the narrative universe would collapse in on itself; you just can't make this kind of shit up. I wish that had been true for Marie, because it would have made the larger world a very different place for everyone.

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Ecce veritas: I first came to Marie Chaix solely because of her translator. Harry Mathews is, to me, a literary polestar. Writers don't come bigger or better in my opinion, and if I ever met someone who advanced that Mathews was the 'best' novelist to ever do the thing, I would not argue against him. Marie Chaix, however, is not Harry Mathews; my reading of Silences, my first encounter, was guilty of some form of false equivalence. For this, I am sorry, Marie.

My thinking was thus: 'Harry didn't fuck with trifles, this Chaix must be good.' What I didn't know was that Harry and Marie were husband and wife, thereby increasing the 'fucking with' likelihood exponentially higher than, say, Bataille. Maybe not. Knowing their interpersonal connection before Lake Constance but after Silences (the wrong order of reading, trust me) informed my reading, but in an entirely different light. Whereas with previous Harry trans I have come to expect a certain degree of elevated metafictional fuckery, I read Chaix's devastating novel quite literally husbanded into my tongue as an act of love; the delicacy of the English translation cannot be understood as anything less than authentic love’s labor. Neither, unparadoxically, can Chaix's retelling.

So, while it's fucked and shittily male of me to frame all this through her husband, that is the factual order of operations that got me here, and I relay it for public acknowledgment of my own shortcomings. What, you ask, is here? The true story of Chaix's father becoming a French conspirator with the Third Reich. Not low level shit, nu-uh; we're talking the proactive seeking out of the Fuhrer and Goering and all your favorite fucking assholes. It is an exquisite book, the kind of thing that sits you on your ass from a standing start. The evil that men do as manifested through the carnage of a little girl's childhood. The inheritance of a history you had no practical part in, but is one so monstrous it defines your world irrevocably. The Autobiography of Joseph Stalin Jr, etc.

What the fuck is WRONG with us as a species?

[Robin J · Rating 5 out of 5]

In clean, clear writing with brief, yet lovely, images, Chaix tells the story of her father, a man so determined to stop one evil--Communism--that he sinks into an even greater evil--Nazism--and eventually becomes a traitor to his own country. She contrasts her father's political folly with her mother's attempt to keep the family afloat during his long absences, including his 12 years in a French prison. I could not put this book down and found myself reading large sections to luxuriate in the beauty of the writing. Despite the emotional nature of the story, Chaix refuses to indulge in pathos yet still manages to convey to emotional core of her and her family's experiences. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

[Cassandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yes, I definitely wish to read this in French, to get the texture. It is fascinating, though, how she weaves it all together. It is really autobiography, a memoir, even though much of it she has to re-imagine or re-invent. And I had not really understood the title properly until I finished it.

[Amber · Rating 2 out of 5]

J’ai eu énormément de difficultés à lire ce livre. Le style ne m’a pas du tout emballée, l’histoire promettait d’être intéressante mais j’ai trouvé de nombreux éléments confus voir incohérents parfois. Ce qui m’aurait plus plu aurait été de savoir comment l’autrice a pu rassembler autant d’informations sur des dialogues entre son père et Doriot alors quelle n’avait elle-même que 2 ans. Je n’ai pas accroché non plus avec la forme et au bout d’un moment il est vraiment devenu difficile pour moi d’attraper le livre pour le continuer. Je n’ai pas tellement honte d’admettre que pour une fois, oui, j’ai sauté quelques pages aux moments où on nous racontait une énième fuite, ou une autre dispute entre les parents…
Dommage.

[Gilles Russeil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Naitre en 1942 ds 1 famille dt le père est engagé à 100 % ds la collaboration. Marie Chaix, 30 ans plus tard, en fit ce magnifique livre, récit littéraire et familial, où le regard de l'enfant rencontre l'histoire

[Chris Appel · Rating 4 out of 5]

Interesting book on the perils of collaborating with FPP during WWII

[Samuel Bellemin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Très bon livre qui narre la complexité de la situation de la France pendant la seconde guerre mondiale, une situation n’est jamais bien ou mal mais bien plus compliquée.

[Pascale · Rating 3 out of 5]

Vividly written. Marie was born in 1942, the fourth and last child of Alice and Albert Beugras. Her mother came from Alsace and had relatives in Germany. Albert was a brilliant engineer who sorely disappointed his father, a peasant turned self-made man, by giving up his job with Rhône-Poulenc to pursue a career in politics. Seduced by the lethally charismatic Jacques Doriot into assuming ever greater responsibilities within his fascist party, Albert found himself in a precarious position once Doriot was liquidated by his German allies in February 1945. Belatedly, Albert then helped the Americans and, according to Marie's account, was offered safe passage to the USA, but declined out of a sense of honor. Thereafter he was arrested, tried and condemned to life imprisonment. Thanks to the tireless efforts of Alice and his lawyer Tixier-Vignancour, he was freed in 1951, and had a third career selling French factories to his former arch-enemies, the Soviets. Subtitled "Chronique d'une collaboration", Les Lauriers is something between a memoir and a novel. A lot of the events in the book happened before Marie was born, or before she could remember anything. The narration is spliced with passages in Albert's voice, presumably taken (whole?) from his diaries and notebooks. Marie expresses anger against her father, who neglected his family in favor of a mission which was widely seen, after the war, as a criminal enterprise. Yet she does not seem to question his integrity and the book doesn't challenge his version of events, which is that all he ever wanted to do was fight Communism and help Doriot take power in France once the Germans were kicked out. The question of Albert's anti-semitism is not broached once. What Marie describes in great detail is her own family tragedy: the death of her elder brother Jean, who chose to follow his father in Germany in 1944 and died in the bombing of Ulm; the hectic and penurious life after the Normandy landings forced them to seek refuge in Suresnes with Alice's sister Mathilde; the shame of being branded a collaborator's daughter long before she could understand what it was her father was guilty of. However, their tribulations were mitigated by the extraordinary devotion of their housekeeper Juliette, to whom the book is dedicated. Even if Alice had to sell her jewelry and take a job to make ends meet, throughout it all she had somebody to lean on.

[Mike Polizzi · Rating 3 out of 5]

Meticulous and engrossing- a daughter's reclamation of her father's war years working as a partisan combating Bolshevism in France, as a Nazi collaborator, and as an almost complete absence from her life. There is a startling lack of feeling, which is necessary in some ways, but in others makes the action in the book feel schematic and expository. When the book shifts perspectives, it succeeds in showing that the defining events of her life happened prior to birth. Her father and her grandfather read as the only fully rendered characters within the book, the rest are cast in their shadows, trying to deal with the fall out of their choices. There's a lot left unexplored by the end, mentioned maybe, but passed over at 30,000 feet that keeps the reclamation from feeling complete.