Double or Nothing: A Real Fictitious Discourse

By Raymond Federman

Book Overview

Double or Nothing is a concrete novel in which the words become physical materials on the page. Federman gives each of these pages a shape or structure, most often a diagram or picture. The words move, cluster, jostle, and collide in a tour de force full of puns, parodies, and imitations. Within these startling and playful structures Federman develops two characters and two narratives. These stories are simultaneous and not chronological. The first deals with the narrator and his effort to make the book itself; the second, the story the narrator intends to tell, presents a young man's arrival in America. The narrator obsesses over making his narrative to the point of not making it. All of his choices for the story are made and remade. He tallies his accounts and checks his provisions. His questioning and indecision force the reader into another radical sense of the novel. The young man, whose story is to be told, also emerges from his obsessions.

Madly transfixing details-noodles, toilet paper, toothpaste, a first subway ride, a sock full of dollars-become milestones in a discovery of America. These details, combined with Federman's feel for the desperation of his characters, create a book that is simultaneously hilarious and frightening. The concrete play of its language, its use of found materials, give the viewer/reader a sense of constant and strange discovery. To turn these pages is to turn the corners of a world of words as full as any novel of literary discourse ever presented. Double or Nothing challenges the way we read fiction and the way we see words, and in the process, gives us back more of our own world and our real dilemmas than we are used to getting.

Picked for American Book Review's 100 Best First Lines from Novels

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1573660752
• ISBN13: 9781573660754
• Release Date: April 1999
• Publisher: University of Alabama Press
• Length: 268 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 6.0" x 9.0"

Customer Reviews

absolutely fascinating genial eye-and-mindboggling

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

One of the best experimental novels out there

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.