Aunt Rachel's Fur [Paperback]

Novelist R‚mond Namredef, the narrator of this endlessly inventive and unorthodox fiction, is on his way back to France after having lived in the United States for 10 years. R‚mond is not returning in the role of the rich American, although he claims to have a wealthy American girlfriend, Susan. In the U.S., it seems, he supported himself through a series of odd jobs, among them one as a jazz musician. These autobiographical details are imparted by R‚mond to a "professional listener" in a number of cafes in Paris. Federman has adopted Raymond Roussel's trick of telling a story for the sake of its digressions. The digressions here include R‚mond's childhood, his life in hiding from the Nazis during the occupation, his multitudinously scheming extended family and his Aunt Rachel's legendary existence. Aunt Rachel escaped from the orphanage in which R‚mond's mother, Marguerite, was also kept and proceeded to enjoy a mysterious international career. At the end of the war, she returns to visit the family, clothed in a very expensive fur. The fur represents success and sexuality, but it also represents the life of luxury, calm and satisfaction that has eluded R‚mond. The novel proceeds from conversation to conversation, the talking punctuated by a bit of desultory action notably, R‚mond's lunch date chez M. Laplume, a famous writer, where he meets the editor of a publishing house and tries to impress her with his sophistication, hoping vainly that she will take his novel. Federman, who was born in France but has spent his adult life teaching and writing in the United States, is the grand old man of American experimental writing; hopefully his reputation won't daunt potential readers of this novel, which is extremely accessible and funny.

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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 experimental 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. Rémond 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 café 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 boundaries 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.