From Publishers Weekly
Starred Review. Wry, cantankerous and darkly hilarious aren't the adjectives one expects to use in describing the story of a young boy orphaned by the Holocaust, but veteran experimental writer Federman (Aunt Rachel's Fur), who lost his own family to the Nazis, eschews overt horror and sadness in favor of a lively exploration of the way memory both stimulates and frustrates the storytelling urge. The novel recounts the attempts of the narrator-whose name, biography and bibliography are nearly identical to Federman's-to locate the French farm where he hid from authorities during World War II. It becomes clear early on that the reader is being led on a "double journey...a journey in search of the farm...And the journey in search of the book." As in the best experimental fiction, form and content compliment one another, and the narrator's fragmented memories unfold in a series of engaging anecdotes involving a misanthropic old farmer, a lonely farm wife, a soon-to-be castrated bull and a mysterious woman in a nearby castle. As the title suggests, there are plenty of mordant musings, à la Beckett, on the nature of life, death and excrement. There's also plenty of pathos: the narrator's memories of his father, "the dreamer, l'artiste manqué, the tubercular romantic," are both merciless and deeply moving. A self-conscious and soulful novel, Federman's latest will be relished by his fans and new readers alike.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
Review
“Federman pursues his work of memory and imagination with a gravity always kept at a distance, and a touch of nostalgia constantly undercut by a saving humor.”—Le Monde
“In this kind of road movie that oscillates between derision, humor, grinding of teeth, stuttering of memory, pure and simple inventions, and even lies, the old story-teller Federman is not afraid to drivel on. A prodigious masterpiece.”—L’Humanité
“In the tragicomic mode, one cannot do better.”—Télérana
Book Description
In 1942, after hiding to escape the Nazis, our narrator (named, simply, Federman) finds his way to Vichy France. Unwanted by his relatives, he is forced to spend the remainder of the war as an unpaid laborer. For three wordless years on the farm, this thirteen-year-old is assailed by suffering, death, sex, and the back-breaking labor of shoveling manure.
Sixty years later, in the United States, Federman—the author? the narrator? both?—wrestles with nostalgia and bitterness. He finally returns to the farm with his wife, but once the journey is complete he no longer knows why he has made it, nor what he expected to find. Through the merger of fact and fiction, storytelling and reality, memoir and imagination, Return to Manure extends and enhances Raymond Federman’s brilliant ability to side-step narration’s limits and impossibilities.
Book Description
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 become 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.
About the Author
Raymond Federman was born in 1928 in France. His novels have been translated into fourteen languages and include Smiles on Washington Square, winner of the American Book Award. He lives in San Diego.
