The Summer of the Elder Tree by Marie Chaix
In three memoiristic novels translated by Harry Mathews and recently published in the US, the French author Marie Chaix draws on a troubling family history. When Chaix was twenty-six, she read notebooks left behind by her dead father, who had been the right-hand man to pro-German Fascist collaborator Jacques Doriot, and had fought beside him in the Wermacht.
In her elegant and memoiristic novel The Summer of the Elder Tree, Marie Chaix fills in the various silences of her past in order to overcome a ten-year hiatus from writing, which started following the death of her editor, Alain Oulman. Translated from the French by her husband, author Harry Mathews, the first American member of the Oulipo, Elder Tree (first published in France in 2005) concludes a triptych of Chaix’s work released by Dalkey Archive Press over the past year. The books draw on a troubling family history. In the first volume of the triptych, The Laurels of Lake Constance (published