Take It or Leave It by Raymond Federman

by Raymond Federman

As told, or rather retold second-hand, by the narrator, Take It or Leave It relates the hilarious and amorous adventures of a young Frenchman who has been drafted into the U.S. Army and is being shipped Overseas to fight in Korea. The obsessed narrator retells, as best he can, what the young man supposedly told him as they sat under a tree. He recounts how the young man escaped German persecution during World War Two, how he came to America and struggled to survive before joining the "rah rah spitshine" 82nd Airborne Division, and how, because of a "typical army goof" he must travel in an old beat-up Buick Special from Fort Bragg to Camp Drum to collect the money the Army owes him, before he can set out for "the great journey cross-country" to San Francisco where he will embark for Overseas. Moving freely from past to present (and Vice Versa), and from place to place leap-frogging from digression to digression, Take It or Leave It explores new possibilities of narrative technique. While the story of Frenchy is being told, the narrator involves his listeners in digressive arguments about politics, sex, America, literature, laughter, death, and the telling of the story itself. Consequently, as this "exaggerated second-hand tale to be read aloud either standing or sitting" progresses, it also deviates from its course, and eventually cancels itself as the voices of the fiction multiply. Take It or Leave It, the ultimate postmodern novel, makes a shamble of traditional fiction and conventional modes of writing, and does so with effrontery and laughter.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, 20th Century, Novels, American, The United States Of America

Unknown Binding

First published February 1, 1981

About the author

Raymond Federman was a French–American novelist and academic, known also for poetry, essays, translations, and criticism. He held positions at the University at Buffalo from 1973 to 1999, when he was appointed Distinguished Emeritus Professor. Federman was a writer in the experimental style, one that sought to deconstruct traditional prose. This type of writing is quite prevalent in his book Double or Nothing, in which the linear narrative of the story has been broken down and restructured so as to be nearly incoherent. Words are also often arranged on pages to resemble images or to suggest repetitious themes.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

In the beginning, there are just words… And the words are Pretext…

All fiction is a digression. It always deviates from its true purpose.
All reading is done haphazardly.

Then the protagonist arrives in America exactly like Karl Rossman of Amerika by Franz Kafka…

I arrived (just like that) by boat and there she was AMERICA (big and fat and beautiful like a cow) just standing there and I looked at her and I wondered (in the beginning a bit puzzled as I stood on the pier in my old outmoded double-breasted blue suit) without understanding a damn thing of what it meant (and I stood there like an ass a poor shy Jewish emigrant) to be here (alone on the platform) my head bent down towards my hands (not even crying) simply asking myself what the fuck am I doing here…

Next, the hero finds himself in the army… And the army sends him into a journey across the land… So Take It or Leave It turns into Raymond Federman’s own version of On the Road, which is quite dissimilar to that of Jack Kerouac…

Okay I concentrate at the wheel (but what soup out there! can’t see a damn thing!) and in less than forty-five miles we change scenery. But meanwhile things were flying in his head, pieces of his past existence coming together and falling asunder into a mishmash of twisted images…

And the hero drives on and on… And he recollects… And he contemplates… And he imagines…
I enjoyed all the beatnik pieces but the formal, formalistic, figurative and typographical digressions these days read as somewhat trashy curios.
At times life just becomes a jazzy improvisation…

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

This is Part II of III in my tribute to 2013 : The Year in Reading.

I am floating -- without shame -- this Review of Raymond Federman’s Take It or Leave It, my most pop=you=l’aire Review of 2013, as not only my most pop=you=l’aire Review of 2013 but as the Review most EMBLEMATIC of my Reading in 2013 :: here you will find the Last Straw which led directly (without passing GO!) to The BURIED Book Club.

Which of your R/reviews was most significant for yourself in 2013?



The Review ::

Take It Or Leave It. TIOLI. It is a HOLOCAUST survivor book. It is a road novel. It is whatever the opposite of ANABASIS is. Leapfrogging. It’s got jazz and masturbation. It is critificiton, surfiction (Federmann to blame for such an ugly word). Poststructuralist if you care about such things. Is an experimental novel, innovative; “TRADITIONAL” if you insist. It’s a second-hand tale, retold. It is in love with stories and story telling. It is a recitation (sitting or standing, as you please). It won’t pass your 100 page test. It’s pages are unnumbered. Coming Soon!!!


But what is important for us is RAID.
RAID your Friends’ shelves; RAID the libraries of favorite authors; McElroy’s, those of the acronyms WTV & DFW, Gass’s, Gaddis’s (you can find this stuff on-line today (have your grandchildren help you with that)); identify a critic to trust (mine lies with the surnames Moore and McCaffery) and RAID their reViews; be that prissy prig who reads only books with fewer than 100 ratings on goodreads; skip the books that have buzz; tattoo a book on yer ass; create the buzz for a book none of your Friends have heard of; lie about it; read that book at your Local Library unchecked-out for 25 years (That’s what RAID means!); read something translated out of Sanskrit; pick up one of the six Chinese Classics; RAID the catalogue of a money-losing publishing House--Dalkey, Dzanc, Fictive Collective, New Directions, FC2, Melville, anything with “University” in its name; dig interviews with favorite authors; go to any and every reading at Your Village BookShop; don’t overlook the self-published--Thomas S. Klise, Even Dara, Sergio de la Pava, The Perv that wrote The Belch; read essays by your favorite authors especially when they talk about their colleagues; commit yourself to completionism of 12 authors and then read the other writers those 12 tell you about; use semicolons, they cost half what a colon does and in today’s markets that’s a bargain; don’t read Infinite Jest again; fall in love with books and the people who write them; collect dictionaries; collect synonyms for “difficult,” “obscure,” and “pretentious”; BE pretentious; watch films in Danish without subtitles and don’t be subtile about it; don’t read The New Yorker, maybe read McSweeneys, absolutely subscribe to The ReiveW of Contumperary FictioN and buy all of their back issues; collect all of the books in Penguin’s Writers from the Other Europe series; bless Gutenberg; swear to spend the next two days speaking of nothing but booksbooksbooks; read a book with a little French innit; say Lesevergnügen; don’t let the bastards grind you down; become Friends with the following: (de Navarre, Djuna, Acker, Nicola, Rosellen, Blixen, Marguerite Young, Comnena, Stein, Murasaki Shikibu, Ursula K., Lady Rabelais, Colette, Emma (we’d be better if more people loved you), Christine de Pizan, Brooke-Rose, Daitch, Lispector, Ozick, I. Allende, Zadie, Diane Johnson, Atwood, Sigrid, Woolf, Dermoût, Lauren Fairbanks, Proulx, Grace Paley (our trouble maker), Rebecca West, Sarashina, Madame de la Fayette, Sei Shōnagon, Kavan, Marie de France, andrea freud lowenstein, Cixous); try to imagine what imaginative qualities of actual things means; read The Misogynist’s Library and take notes, that’s your best revenge; read everything by Gallblatt Sorrenteeno but leave Blue Pastoral for last; listen to Beethoven; don’t forget to give a friend a copy of Rabelais; read books that intimidate you and then make them your friend; invent new modalities of sexual relations with your books, just go wild; preen about what you’ve read; spend six hours at a Second-Hand bookshop; buy that one book just because that one writer had a blurb on it; identify and read unFilmable books, like the Bible which Hollywood has demonstrated multiple times is unFilmable, except when they make a detour through that one fictioNNovel; buy a book by someone whose name appears on a book you got randomly curious about; if a name is new to you and you’re not certain which is which, don’t straighten it out, just read one from each name; go for a walk; join Friends of the Library; buy a book with reader marginalia in it; write reviews on goodreads; read the apocalyptic portions of τας βιβλους in The New Oxford Annotated (NRSV) and it won’t weird you out anymore; correct the bad grammar of others in your own broken grammar; don’t believe that books are commodities just because you get them with money or because amazon treats them as such; have pet peeves about word choice; demand word counts every time you read a comment by Ali; read collected letters and biographies; buy at least four books for every one you read; believe every blurb you read on every second Friday; read to your children in languages they don’t know; hate a book your Friends love and then love a book back just from spite; look at: my link text &&& Rediscoveries: Informal Essays in Which Well-Known Novelists Rediscover Neglected Works of Fiction By One of Their Favorite Authors (thnks ERICERICERICERICERIC); fall asleep reading The Wake that you might wake with finnegan at the grand FUNfurall; next year, commit to read one book from each of the past 25 centuries.

TODAY BOOKS ARE NOT BURNED, THEY ARE BURIED.
THEY ARE BURIED UNDER MOUNTAINS OF SHIT.
DO THE EARTH A FAVOR,
SAVE THE WHALES,
AND UNEARTH BOOKS.

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the energy a novel should have
[breathless ceaseless churning foaming!]

This is the form a novel should take
[infinite endless beginningless!]

This is the way words come to a page
[torrents towers cataracts pillars!]

This is the place between speech and prose
[voices voices from beyond the page!]

This is the aim of all great art
[laughing down Death in its face!]

This is the truth of the world of words
[lies! lies! lies!]

This is the truth of the storyteller’s name
[mask! mask! mask!]

This is the thing that cannot be spoken
[___! ___! ___!]

This one thing negates the void
[story! story! story!]

This is death that brings rebirth
[narrative! narrative! narrative!]

This is the truth of Time and Life
[ever-descending-ascending-spirals!]

This is the point of all our striving
[to approach the knowledge of our own names!]

This is the thing that transcends Death
[echo! echo! echo!]

This is the reason we make our words
[world! world! world!]

This is the thing that cannot be known
This is the thing we cannot approach
This is the thing that must be words
This is the empty core
This sustains us to our last gasp
This is all that is written around
This is all that is suffered through
This is why we seek out love
This is why our bodies entwine
This is the way the world ends
This is the way the world ends
[not with a whimper but a BANG!]

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to talk a little about Federman and Celan, as a way of illuminating some of the reasons this book has burrowed so rapidly under my skin. Celan has been hugely important to me for many years, and his work ranks high on my list of literary loves. His writing is sparse, broken, hermetic (though he always said it was not – and he is right, to a certain extent – but this is not the place for that discussion), each word dense as a singularity with all that weight of meaning and memory condensed within it. Gravity noticeably increases in the presence of his texts. We move slower, it becomes harder to keep one's head raised, one's back straight. Federman is, on the surface, almost the opposite. His words rush, run, stumble, flood, break themselves open with self-mockery and play. He is funny. Very very funny. And yet, somehow, the faster he runs the more visible is the drag. For, in fact, both writers have been devastated by the same phenomena – not just the Shoah, but the effect these horrors had on language, on speech and on the stability and security of the old forms. Both writers are pained by words, by the attempt, and the compulsion, to tell. One curls into a ball like a terrified hedgehog, the other runs and runs. Both produce texts riven with sorrow and doubt, both are desperately driven by the need to communicate something incommunicable. Both know they are failing, and refuse to give up. What they are doing, what they did (for both have changed tense) is important, do you hear me? important, vital.

Reading interviews and articles by Ray, and discovering how much Beckett meant to him, has only increased my respect and admiration for his work. These three writers, and there are others, were part of the post-war literary movement that most moves me. 2014 will be as full of Ray as possible. Read him.

[Bogdan · Rating 5 out of 5]

When, at the library, I leafed through this book, I was in fact more inclined to already leave it there, than to take it home and read it. At a glance, I saw words scattered on every page, with large

empty

spaces

between them or, sometimes, spaces filled with such an amount of various symbols, to make it seem as if the author simply tried to exhaust there his keyboard's capacities;

there were
columns
of words
in other
places,

words
f
-a
--l
---l
----l
-----l
------i
-------n
--------g diagonally, in steps of letters, from a seemingly fragmented sentence to another one—maybe its continuation—words in

w a v e s
 a v e s

or [between parentheses], isolated or highlighted by them, capsLOCKED.

Seeing all that, I thought to myself OMG (that’s both an abbreviation and the most innocent euphemism of what I actually thought to myself): it’s a book where I, the reader, have to gather the words together somehow; it's me who has to puzzle it all up in order to make it more or less coherent. I don’t have the patience for that MERDE! (That’s French for shit—the author is bilingual.) And I added, still thinking to myself, «anyway, it won’t pay off, it’s just the usual postmodernist chamber of mirrors, with texts instead of mirrors. In between and behind all these mirrors of texts, there will be the VOID, the dark matter, or the absence of any substance, where only the spectre of the author roams because, as Barthes puts it, he is “mort”.» Nevertheless, I didn’t leave the book at the library; I took it home [I don’t know why]. There it stayed on my shelf reserved for borrowed books for maybe more than a couple of months, until I took it again [I don't know why] but this time, I started to read it patiently.

Fellow readers, I was amazed! Then, humbled. Then, a few more pages into it, it became such a fluent read that it was carrying me like a ♪chant♪. Now, I want to insist on this last word, because the book is indeed organized like a partiture |=♪=♪==|. Everything that at first glance seemed scattered on its pages has, as it turns out, its precise place□ in the flow~~~ and the harmony∞ of the whole○. The fragmentation only conducts the changing tempos of the book, not unlike musical directions such as piano, pianissimo, allegro, staccato, forte, and so on. The control over the rhythms and the tune of what is written in such—only apparently extravagant and useless—manner is unbelievable; the “écriture” (to quote Barthes again) has its pure economy; it always follows the expressive necessities of the book. It actually doesn’t have anything erratic about it; nothing is scattered.

Take your time, get into its tempos, and you’ll see: this author was a composer of literature. Not for nothing, on the title page we get the indication that this “tale” is meant “to be read aloud either standing or sitting.” I read it quietly to myself, lying on the sofa, but even so, I was transported by the harmonious orality of this book.

[I almost forgot to make a ● clear: I don't know if you knew it already, or if you believe me, but all this is not poetry, it's pure prose and the whole thing reads just as smoothly as Jack Kerouack. It has beatnik elements with visual effects to them: a jazzy style, with words going all over the page and a whooshing storyline. Besides, the life on the road is actually central to this novel, with an “easy ride” through America from end to end and an inspiring buddy – just like Dean Moriarty in Jack Kerouack’s novel – to go along with, though here the existence of the accompanying mate is a bit questionable, he might be just a doubling of the narrator.]

For the finale, I’ll just blow a little {{{flourish}}} about the book's content: like its form, this doesn’t disappoint either. The text is not a dark matter that merely covers a void. And it’s not the void that resonates or echoes; rather, a very clear and unique – although jazzilly varied in endless improvisations – voice is constantly heard throughout. The author is very much alive and recounts, in an ingenious and jouissant way, his hard but adventurous life as a Jewish French émigré in America. After he fled from 𝖋𝖆𝖘𝖈𝖎𝖘𝖙 𝕰𝖚𝖗𝖔𝖕𝖊, he’s by no means at rest in the New World from this universal & human, all too human phenomenon, personified here mostly by a faceless, brainless, soulless mass of biogotic, xenophobic, racist rednecks. Otherwise, a more subtle, but equally concrete, though sweeter sounding ♪malaise♪ in (post)postmodernity is reflected in the mirrors of these pages and played on the book's partiture |=♪==♪=|

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Reading Federman’s blackly comedic meta-sur-critifictions renders one breathless and inspired. Federman is hands-down (on the basis of this and Double or Nothing) the strongest practitioner of metafiction on the block. His fictions operate at multiple narrative levels and make their typographical flurries integral to the telling (and retelling—detelling—untelling—ad infinitum). Sorrentino plunders his childhood for material and his novels become less meta, more sentimental. Federman’s attempt to find a form to narrate his extraordinarily wrenching upbringing results in digressive, recursive, cannily structured chapters that wrestle with a rebelling memory, and levels of authorial distance (a ‘second-hand narrator’ takes over for most of this novel) alongside the ever-present voices of listeners and readers, all of whom appear in varying fonts and configurations, or inside sentences one suspected were safely fixed within one authorial voice. Federman truly took metafiction to dimensions his FC2 compadres Sukenick or Katz (namechecked here) failed to attain with their surreal or fragmented narratives. On the downside, this novel sometimes strains to make the mundane details of Ray’s postwar adventures immersing, and the constant rampant chauvinism of the narrator(s), alongside superfluous sex bits diminish some of the humour and pace of the novel. Otherwise, staggering.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

What’s to say? Another of Raymond Federman’s several masterpieces; the logical extension of his previous masterwork/debut; one of the greatest road novels ever written (mostly driven in circles); and our hero’s tragic, hilarious heart, too big for even the fucking Nazis to conquer.

You’re missed, M. Federman, but reunited with your X’s.

(X-X-X-X+X)

[Madison Santos]

at the best moments its unlike any other novel, the high-tempo scenes structured off of bebop, federman's criticism of his work focalized through a snobby phD and a know-nothing soldier rules.

but... not sure if the furor he puts into those chapters make up for the rest of the novel, any author going self-aware about the insular community of literary criticism and making nothing but jokes about literary criticism to an audience that is made up of nothing but literary criticism nerds is forcibly enjoyable: if you don't like it, you can't take a joke. if you like it, you're open to criticism of your love for Derrida.
unpopular opinion also, the typography doesn't to much to e x p a n d the seemingly REVOLUTIONARY nature of this book and usually
f
a
l
l
s

short of interesting deconstruction of typographic norms.

gonna go after double or nothing next.

[Alex · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'll take it.

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

i'
l
l
t
a
k
e
it!
see what i did there?! ok. i'll stop. this novel i guess is meta-fiction? and uses different layouts of the type to create tension and creativity. this supra-gonzo style really got cranking in the mid-70's to 80's but seemed to sputter out after that. i wonder why?
this story pokes fun at this world we've made out of guns and butter, cum and motor oil, hair and dirt.

other folks on goodreads have way better thoughts on this fantastical book, see them do.


well, see, my cutesy wiggle sentence didnt ev3n work. see this review for more funn https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

A modern day Tristram Shandy, chockful of digressions, divagations, discursiveness on a meandering road trip. It plays with metafiction (or what the author calls 'surfiction') as ostensibly this is a tale told to the writer by another person for which the author writes it up into a recitation rather than a story. But readers get introduced into the action, seated alongside and even having a sexual relationship with the protagonist. The author constantly deconstructs his art, spinning off into interludes about considering the best extant writing about sex, audience expectations and even disappears from the action for a period or is impressed upon by his character to let him have a spell at the writing wheel. The whole affect is one of disruption of the flow, that the reader is not to be given an easy ride. But I'm not sure to what purpose. Nor do I feel the formatting/typographical flourishes to break up the block of text on a page are particularly suggestive of anything beyond disruption. Therefore they seem gratuitous rather than organically embedded. It's hard to say that the book goes and gets nowhere, because that is its point, the journey rather than the destination; the (literary conceit) scenery rather than any journey's end. The bits I liked the most were many of the considerations of writing and the role of the author, but these could also be very easily construed as self-indulgent and self-reflexive by a different reader.

[Alexander Weber · Rating 4 out of 5]

well this book took a long time to read. not that it is hard to read, at least in a conventional way. well, this book isn't conventional in a lot of ways. which is probably it's main strength. that and the avoidance of telling his story...not the main one, of course, but the one about his family (x-x-x-x)

[Terry · Rating 4 out of 5]

I liked this so much better than Double or Nothing!

[أحمد الحقيل]

لا تُـقيَّم. تُدرَس، تُكرَه أو تُحَب، لا يهم.
فيديرمان تجريبي مجنون، هنالك كتاب رواياتهم تسحب حدود الرواية كمفهوم لغوي سردي إلى أقصى مداه، وتحاول أن تختبره. لأنه في الأخير: ما هي الرواية؟ ولكي تكون أكثر وضوحا بما أن الرواية في أساسها لغة: ما هي اللغة؟ متى يعتبر المكتوب كحروف لغة وسردا، ومتى يعتبر البناء المصنوع من الحروف رواية وحكاية. ستجده بشكل أقدم في الشعر، عند باول سيلان، ولاحقا في أدب المنمنمات الامريكي. هنا درس، يحتاج لصبر وأناة وطولة بال. إذا لم تكن تملك هذا أو ليس لديك وقت له، لا تقترب منه. فيدرمان يحاول بكل جهد ان يخلق نمطا صوريا، ولكن لا تتشكل فيه الصورة فقط، وإنما الصوت أيضا، النطق، ثم يصنع من خلاله سياق تعبير لا يضع الفهم أولوية له وإنما التلقي الحسي. وكأن الرواية تحاول القيام بدور سينمائي. على مسؤوليتك. أنا ما لي دخل.

[Ken Titt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Pure genius.

[Pete Camp · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hilarious, well crafted tale. Told second hand or third hand or first person. Several narratives intervene with multiple digressions and laugh out loud anecdotes. Highly recommended