Raymond Federman

Return to Manure is Raymond Federman’s thirteenth novel, a surfictional collage of remembrance and expectation. Through an interplay of conversations between the narrator (Raymond Federman), his wife, and an unnamed listener, readers are privy to the twisting of the author’s — or is it merely a character’s? — experiences. After hiding in a closet as a teenager in 1942 to escape the Nazis, Federman finds his way to a distant relative’s farm in Vichy, France. He soon realizes he is unwanted there and spends the remainder of the war as an unpaid provincial laborer. On the farm, he confronts life at its most raw, witnesses suffering and death, sex and reproduction, and shovels lots of manure. Sixty years later in the United States, Federman wrestles with both nostalgia and bitterness:

All this makes me wonder if perhaps the farm hadn’t become my real home, the place where I was born, well reborn after my childhood was tragically interrupted, and if now as I grow older I am yearning to be back there. To do what? Shovel manure? Sleep in the barn with the cows? Re-suffer what I suffered?

The aging narrator finally returns to France with his wife to find the farm where he slaved as a youth, but he no longer knows why he has come or what to expect.

Federman, with anger-tinged humor, explores and celebrates the fragility of human memory. Through simultaneous revelation of past and present, he manipulates common conceptions of time, folding narrative back upon itself in an endless attempt to recover a past that was always half-fiction. With Return to Manure, Federman reinvents the novel once again, seducing us with dreams we know better than to believe but can never seem to doubt.

In Aunt Rachel’s Fur, Raymond Federman — French by birth, American by adoption, Jew by memory — plays with the language of his childhood to construct a story from digressions. Federman’s narrative spirals into a temporal abyss as he rummages in old memories tattooed with cabbages, plump breasts, and the Final Solution. His book swirls with the narrative innovations that mark him as a leading experimenal surfictioneer.

Aunt Rachel’s Fur is a novel about its own telling, an intimate meeting between voice and reader, in which flesh and blood are reduced to fiction, and fiction, by its telling, becomes fact. Reymond Namredef, a French expatriate, has returned to France after a disastrous decade in America, with 365 boxes of pasta and the hope of publishing his novel about a novelist. In a cafe in Paris, he meets a “professional listener,” and, through a series of conversations, offers a loose account of his life that shows little respect for chronology. His story is woven of fragments, branching out over a lifetime and capturing the alchemy of fiction and memory.

Faced with the chaos of the twentieth century, Federman finds humanity in the absurd. Like novelists Mark Amerika and Ronald Sukenick, he skewers literary convention and pushes the boundary of postmodernism. Aunt Rachel’s Fur is both a tribute to his love of the word — the story as it is told — and a further exploration of our understanding of fiction.

Double or Nothing is a concrete novel in which the words become physical materials on the page. Federman gives each of these pages a shape or structure, most often a diagram or picture. The words move, cluster, jostle, and collide in a tour de force full of puns, parodies, and imitations. Within these startling and playful structures Federman develops two characters and two narratives. These stories are simultaneous and not chronological. The first deals with the narrator and his effort to make the book itself; the second, the story the narrator intends to tell, presents a young man’s arrival in America. The narrator obsesses over making his narrative to the point of not making it. All of his choices for the story are made and remade. He tallies his accounts and checks his provisions. His questioning and indecision force the reader into another radical sense of the novel. The young man, whose story is to be told, also emerges from his obsessions.

Madly transfixing details — noodles, toilet paper, toothpaste, a first subway ride, a sock full of dollars — become milestones in a discovery of America. These details, combined with Federman’s feel for the desperation of his characters, create a book that is simultaneously hilarious and frightening. The concrete play of its language, its use of found materials, give the viewer/reader a sense of constant and strange discovery. To turn these pages is to turn the corners of a world of words as full as any novel of literary discourse ever presented. Double or Nothing challenges the way we read fiction and the way we see words, and in the process, gives us back more of our own world and our real dilemmas than we are used to getting.

Picked for American Book Review’s 100 Best First Lines from Novels

As told, or rather retold second-hand, by the narrator, Take It or Leave It relates the hilarious and amorous adventures of a young Frenchman who has been drafted into the U.S. Army and is being shipped Overseas to fight in Korea. The obsessed narrator retells, as best he can, what the young man supposedly told him as they sat under a tree. He recounts how the young man escaped German persecution during World War Two, how he came to America and struggled to survive before joining the “rah rah spitshine” 82nd Airborne Division, and how, because of a “typical army goof,” he must travel in an old beat-up Buick Special from Fort Bragg to Camp Drum to collect the money the Army owes him, before he can set out for “the great journey cross-country” to San Francisco where he will embark for Overseas.

Moving freely from past to present (and vice versa), and from place to place leap-frogging from digression to digression, Take It or Leave It explores new possibilities of narrative technique. While the story of Frenchy is being told, the narrator involves his listeners in digressive arguments about politics, sex, America, literature, laughter, death, and the telling of the story itself. Consquently, as this “exaggerated second-hand tale to be read aloud either standing or sitting” progresses, it also deviates from its course, and eventually cancels itself as the voices of the fiction multiply. Take It or Leave It, the ultimate postmodern novel, makes a shambles of traditional fiction and conventional modes of writing, and does so with effrontery and laughter.

This book consists of a set of letters from an unidentified writer to an unidentified recipient. In the letters, a writer sets forth his plans for a book about two children who were separated from their families during a war. He plans to invent a narration that will fully reveal their experiences during that war, experiences that are at the base of their reality, and the memory of which will also retrieve them from their present, supernumerary lives.

The two children, it develops, escaped the roundups of Jews in a city much like Paris during World War II. The book contains the story of their ambiguous survival, which may or may not be that of the author. Now, fifty years later, the two have re-established contact and plan a reunion in Israel.

In the last scene of the book two figures, their features obscured by the long shadows of evening, lean toward one another as they speak from the confidence of their hearts. Also there, listening, is the writer of the letters that form the book. The novel ends mysteriously, and so continues to vibrate in our imagination. To Whom it May Concern: will join that short list of books we treasure most deeply, those few statements that remind us of who we are, and of what we are capable.