Raymond Federman, Avant-Garde Novelist and Beckett Scholar, Dies at 81
Raymond Federman, a French-born scholar, critic and avant-garde novelist whose work sought to straddle the boundary between fiction and reality — and in so doing to emphasize the inadequacy of language to capture either one completely — died last Tuesday in San Diego. He was 81 and lived in San Diego.
The cause was cancer, his daughter, Simone Federman, said.
At his death, Mr. Federman was a SUNY distinguished professor emeritus of English at the State University at Buffalo, where he had taught for more than three decades.
Mr. Federman wrote most of his books in English, others in French. A friend of the playwright Samuel Beckett, he first came to public attention as a Beckett scholar, and in his own fiction Mr. Federman deployed prose in similarly unorthodox fashion. His books, aimed at the eye as well as the ear, were typically characterized by their artful typography and self-referential, often playful manipulation of language.
In Mr. Federman’s first novel, “Double or Nothing: A Real Fictitious Discourse” (Swallow Press, 1971), each page is a carefully arranged, self-contained collage of black text on an open white ground. The net effect — one of fragmentation, displacement and emptiness — suits the subject matter of the book, the loss of the narrator’s parents and siblings in the Holocaust.
Reviewing the novel in The New York Times Book Review, Ronald Sukenick wrote, “ ‘Double or Nothing’ breaks up that solid page of print we are all too ready to expect in fiction, and suggests a new convention more persuasively than any novel I know of.” He added: “It is a considerable achievement.”
Mr. Federman’s other work was also concerned with absence, survival and the arbitrary savagery of history. “The Voice in the Closet” (Coda Press, 1979), told in a single unbroken sentence, conjures up the voice of a boy in hiding who hears the Nazis take his family away.
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The cause was cancer, his daughter, Simone Federman, said.
At his death, Mr. Federman was a SUNY distinguished professor emeritus of English at the State University at Buffalo, where he had taught for more than three decades.
Mr. Federman wrote most of his books in English, others in French. A friend of the playwright Samuel Beckett, he first came to public attention as a Beckett scholar, and in his own fiction Mr. Federman deployed prose in similarly unorthodox fashion. His books, aimed at the eye as well as the ear, were typically characterized by their artful typography and self-referential, often playful manipulation of language.
In Mr. Federman’s first novel, “Double or Nothing: A Real Fictitious Discourse” (Swallow Press, 1971), each page is a carefully arranged, self-contained collage of black text on an open white ground. The net effect — one of fragmentation, displacement and emptiness — suits the subject matter of the book, the loss of the narrator’s parents and siblings in the Holocaust.
Reviewing the novel in The New York Times Book Review, Ronald Sukenick wrote, “ ‘Double or Nothing’ breaks up that solid page of print we are all too ready to expect in fiction, and suggests a new convention more persuasively than any novel I know of.” He added: “It is a considerable achievement.”
Mr. Federman’s other work was also concerned with absence, survival and the arbitrary savagery of history. “The Voice in the Closet” (Coda Press, 1979), told in a single unbroken sentence, conjures up the voice of a boy in hiding who hears the Nazis take his family away.