Aunt Rachel's Fur - Reviews

"M. Namderef is a failed writer-and a failed American-who has returned home to Paris to confront his past, escape his lover, and publish his novel, "A Time of Noodles" (about a failed writer who survives on noodles for a year). But Namderef is also a liar and a literary provocateur, so who can tell what's true? Between Namderef's "Playgiarism" and Federman's "auto-bio-graffiti," an eclectic and ribald novel emerges, of family strife, class conflict, and French Jewishness."

—The New Yorker, May 7, 2001

"This most recent novel, written first in French then translated to a sort of French-English hybrid in some instances, highlights the life of Namredef as told by him to various audiences. Federman seems to play with several notions of language through his manipulation of this character. Not only is the protagonist a writer himself, writing a novel seemingly similar (in tone, but not in narrative) to the one which Federman presents to the reader, but he also narrated the tale to another listener, illustrating the different storytelling methods and tones employed when speaking to different people. These techniques seem to bring into question the "truth" of the story that Namredef narrates (and Federman writes) as well as allowing a lengthy discussion throughout the novel about the act of writing itself.

According to Federman, the 'truth' is what he writes, not necessarily the reality of the 'story':

Stating this in the early pages of the novel, this question of truth allows the reader to consistently discredit the narrator and to question his position as a 'truthteller' in works of fiction in general."

—Daphne Potts, PopMatters

"Yes, the credit line is right: this novel is "transacted," not "translated," form the French.

Aunt Rachel's Fur is Federman's seventh novel and the first to be set entirely in France. More importantly, its telling takes place in France as well. After living ten tough years in America, Federman's expatriate narrator has returned to Paris, intent upon placing his novel with a French publisher and pursuing a writer's career in the Gallic manner. But the plan doesn't work, because the protagonist has become too American, too much of an innovative fictionist for the French literary establishment. So it's back to the U. S. and a resumption of the struggle to be a writer there.

The novel Federman's narrator is trying to sell resembles his own classic work, Double or Nothing (1971) and so the story has a happy ending implied: as a writer, the guy eventually made it. But as happens so often in literature, it's the teller and his telling that are more important than the tale. Hence this "transacted" business. For 280 pages the speaker sits in a series of Parisian cafes, telling a listener why he's returned to his childhood home and what he expects to accomplish. In the process, virtually all the materials of the Ferderman canon are rehearsed: early life with his family, their erasure in the Holocaust, his survival as a farm worker in Vichy France, the selfish cruelty of his surviving relatives, his emigration to America and years of struggle at the bottom of the economic heap, his U. S. Citizenship, Army service, education, and first efforts as a writer. What's new is the story referred to in the title-his glamorously mysterious Aunt Rachel, jeweled and in furs and promising a better way of life, sex and all.

As compelling as the saga is, it is even more remarkable to hear the narrator talk about it. That's why the novel has the listener built in: for every writerly trick there's a corresponding readerly reaction, with the ongoing story being shaped by both. This transaction between the writer and reader is given another dimension in the language itself; while predominantly American, it is flavored with working class Parisian slang (the meaning of which are easily surmised) and colored overall by the shadings of France literary masters-the full range of them, from Racine and Voltaire to Samuel Beckett and Boris Vian. Given who he is, Federman's narrator cannot escape these influences. But he can indeed reshape them, being sordid yet without Zola's preoccupation with detail, angry but lacking the vilification that ruins Celine, lyrical but short of the preciousness that sometimes cloys in the work of Paul Celan. These writers are all cited, of course, quite naturally because Federman's narrator is contemplating joining forces with them.

Yet in the end he doesn't, and for a very good reason that the transacted narrative dramatizes. For Federman's narrator, and perhaps for Federman himself, the literary dimensions of France remain a closed system, while America's imaginatively open space allows a least a hint of freedom. Maybe that freedom is illusory, as utopian as the too-good-to-be-true promises of life as lived by Aunt Rachel. But in the U. S. the protagonist can, at least, write. And as he explains to a recalcitrant Parisian sub-editor, 'your life is not the story you write, the story you write is your life.'"

—Jerome Klinkowitz, Rain Taxi, Summer 2001