Aunt Rachel's Fur by Raymond Federman
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, Remond 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 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.
Federman, Raymond: - Raymond Federman (1928-2009) was one of the most significant fiction writers of recent generations. Federman emigrated to the US in 1947 following the deaths of his mother, father, and two sisters in the extermination camp at Auschwitz. His early experiences in the US included being a American paratrooper in Korea, a saxophone player in Detroit, and a dishwasher and student in Columbia University, before earning a PhD at UCLA and becoming one of the first American critical promoters of the work of Samuel Beckett. Federman taught literature and creative writing at SUNY-Buffalo for 35 years. His numerous experience, exploits, and linguistic inventions have become the basis for nearly than thirty books of fiction, poetry, and criticism, translated into German, Italian, French, Hungarian, Polish, Serbian, Rumanian, Hebrew, Dutch, Greek, Japanese, Chinese, and Swahili. Federman has also been the recipient of numerous awards in the US and abroad, including the American Book Award for Smiles on Washington Square. An important theorist of contemporary writing, Federman always insisted on the integration and inseparability of memory and imagination, fact and fiction. I have to still believe, he once said in an interview, as I often do, that one of these days around a street corner I'm going to meet my sisters.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9781573660938 |
| ISBN 10 | 1573660930 |
| Title | Aunt Rachel's Fur |
| Author | Raymond Federman |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Binding Type | Paperback |
| Publisher | The University of Alabama Press |
| Year published | 2001-04-11 |
| Number of pages | 282 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |