BLATT mourns the passing of Raymond Federman

Raymond Federman, author of over a dozen works of fiction, poetry, and criticism, passed away on October 6^th, according to his daughter. He was eighty-one-years old.

Federman was born in Montrouge, France on May 15, 1928. When the Nazis invaded France, his parents hid him in a closet – an experience the author would later draw on in his 1979 work, The Voice in the Closet. His family did not survive the Holocaust. In 1947, Federman immigrated to the United States, eventually earning his PhD in literature at UCLA in 1963 and becoming one of America’s most vocal apologists of Samuel Beckett.

Federman’s own work is characterized by extreme fragmentation, formal experimentation, and inventive wordplay. In a 2006 interview with Rain Taxi magazine, Federman stated: “It’s clear, I think, once one gets into my work, that I am a multiple human being. Not only in the way I live — I live like a good bourgeois, I play golf, I used to be a paratrooper, I played the saxophone, I bummed around, I starved in New York, I did all those things — so it’s clear when I sit down to write that I am not one single voice.”

For over two decades, Federman worked as a professor at the University of Buffalo. He retired in 1999, and devoted the remaining years of his life to a prolific output of writing. Some of his best-known books include Double or Nothing, My Body in Nine Parts, To Whom It May Concern, Aunt Rachel’s Fur, and The Twofold Vibration. His study of Samuel Beckett, Journey into Chaos: Samuel Beckett’s Early Fiction, is considered to be a pioneering work of the Irish author and is frequently cited by Beckett scholars. Federman also maintained a lively blog that has been highly popular in the experimental literary community.

Federman’s most recent book was The Carcasses: A Fable, though there is much speculation that the late author left behind a slew of unpublished and unfinished works.