my review is short -- a line from a great poem by w.b. yeats: how can you tell the dancer from the dance

The structure of this book is ingeniuous - it's a guy writing a book about a guy writing a book about a 19 year old French Jewish boy coming to the US after his family is killed in the camps in WW2. This means you're immersed in this obsessive story about a guy planning on boying 365 days' worth of toilet paper and noodles and locking himself in a room to write, while the story about the kid is unrolled bit by bit, changed, modified, and improved. The typeography is all over the place, making the confusion even more profound by drawing things with the text, switching fonts, spacing, etc. There's a lot of humor in the obsession of the fictional writer, and the index/discourse at the end of the book is a killer. The writing puts it over the top, but the structure - the whole idea - is one of a kind.

It's hard to describe this book, but it's basically a second-hand narrative of a French immigrant that joins the army, and is going to take a trip across the country on 30 days leave before he gets shipped to the Korean war. The story weaves through the past, talking about living in New York, Detroit, working in the Catskills, playing jazz sax, living with a bunch of redneck paratrooper soldiers, and the struggle to drive in the middle of the night through a horrific Vermont snowstorm so he can get his paycheck and start his trip. The story is interesting, compelling, and funny - but that's the icing on this oddly structured cake. The narrator weaves through points of view, retells parts, changes things, comes back, and keeps going. There's some experimental text here and there, where he breaks out of the traditional paragraph to express anger, rage, or confusion. And no page numbers. It's circular, confusing, entertaining, and one of the best post-modern books out there.

The Twofold Vibration is a book that has yet to find an audience. It situates itself somewhere between a few different genres; between fact and fiction, history and futuricity, autobiograpy and science ficiton, pastiche and kitsch. Most importantly, i t situates itself inbetween the Holocaust and a departure from the planet which is a hybrid of science fiction and biblical messianism. The focus of the novel, the "old man" is investigated by two narrators (Namredef and Moinous: translated as Federman spelled backwards and "my mind" respectively) and one writer who makes an assemblage out of their information/ficitonal information (and perhaps misinformation) about the old man. The major task of these three is to find out why the old man is being deported to another planet. But with all the information we get about him we still don't get an answer. What we do get is a rich collage that includes both a missed encounter and a quasi-real encounter with the Nazis, as well as a narrative about how the old man returns to the camps later in his life (albeit accidentally). The accidentlal return to the camps begins when he meets a Jane Fonda type of woman of the 60s, a woman who is a film star slash political activist. The narrative itself is entirely borrowed from film which brings out its kitcshiness and a scence of non-reality. His involvement with this woman leads to taking risk after risk, and eventually gets him onto a plane for Europe where they go to gamble have sex etc. At some point, we are not sure, this "story" ends and another begins, this time with the two narrators. In this new plot line, in which we learn about the friendship and travels of these three, ther is another mad flight from caisno to casino. Eventually this leads them into Germany. One of the highlights of the journey is a Wagner opera out of which the old man attempts to make some obesrvations about the German people and Nazis, this proves futile. At some point, after this opera, he disspaears from his friends for a reason that is seemingly arbitrary: He had to "think" so he left. In the meantime they don't know if he is dead. After he departs from them, he accidentally meets other people whom bring out how, in the aftermath of the holocast (in a an age of media and mass efficiency) fiction and reality overlap. He meets a Jewish film producer from Holloywood who wants to make a film about the Holocast (though he never went through it) and his non-Jewish Grilfriend who is more a reflex than a person. She exerts a mechanical pity and has a likewise mechincal form of sex with the old man. At some point he leaves the couple and this branches off into another story of how he loses all his money and ends up in Paris, where they meet up with him again. At this point, the narrative takes a turn toward sci-fi and the detective novel. The narrators and the writer realize that the old man will depart very soon, therefore they make it their task to find out what he did wrong to get deported, and then perhaps they could make things right and save him. I won't tell what ends up happening in the end of the book, that is left to the reader to discern. But for now, I can say that the end of the book inter-weaves a messianic plot with epistmeological and exigetical questions concerning the meaning of existence and the search for meaning in general (and its diversions). Its a cross between Thomas Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49, eastern messianism, a sci-fi nightmare, and a Beckett Play where a plot is interrupted by a form of existential absurdity. The greatness of this ending has less to do with how it brings all of these genres together into a configuration, but in how it invents a discourse after the Holocaust that is concerned not just with the past, but with a future that is not just situated in a realistic manner, but in a fictional manner. It is for this reason that Federman should be reconsidered by Holocast critics like Hartman and Felman whom have taken such an interest in testimony that they have (unfortunatley) discounted work such as Federman's as promoting a form of "amnesia" (Hartman) and diversion that goes nowhere in contrast to Video testimony (at Yale for Hartman, Felman, and Langer) that has something to give to the next generation (what Langer calls "collected memory" a la James Young vs- "collective memory", that is public memory which, for Hartman, vulgarizes the Holocaust.) Hartman argues that Federman's work, like Video Testimony, challenges the notion of "false memory" ("collective memory") but falls short of testimony becase this is all it does. This bias does an injustice to Federman's work. Anyone who takes time to read this book will realize the injustice that has been done. At one point in this book, Federman (the first person narrator) writes that the Holocaust has become a concern for everyone, it is not just an event that Jews and Germans need to work through. This implies that this book should be read as a work of the imagination, the historical imagination. Federman shows us that the historical imagination can and should deal with the Holocast in way that figures out how it will travel into the future by way of a world where fact and fiction overlap, a world where Hollywood producers make films on the Holocast and where the old man is about to be deported for something no one knows about, a deportation that is like the deportation to Aushwitz (and not like it), a deportation that is at the same time thoroughly fictional and at the same time quite real. This book should be read in the sence that it meditates on a departure/deportation that hasn't yet happened, just as another great book of Federman's To Whom it May Concern is about an arrival that hasn't happened but is in the process of happening.

This author intrigues me. He has taken writing all the way back to an art form that is shockingly honest, agressively creative, and just plain derivative. NYT bestselling authors don't have what he has.

This book blew me away -- the first I read it in 1987 and until yesterday, when I read it again. This is probably the best (and most coherenet) book Ferderman the Featherman has ever written. An intro the writer? This is the book to start with.