Aunt Rachel's Fur Book

Since Federman is the storyteller here, I'll let him do most of the work:
"...if I hadn't become a writer I probably would have been a painter, or maybe a sculptor, yes a sculptor because sculptors have to be violent, they have to fight with their material, I would have done dirty erotic art, I would have created obscene scatological objects to symbolize the great crime of our century…"
&...&
"...one dances for nothing, only for the beauty of dancing, for the form, because one can never tell the dancer from the dance, as Yeats put it so well, the walker always walks for a reason, it's the reason that makes him walk, good or bad, useful or useless, doesn't matter, ah but one dances for no reason, that's what you have to understand if you're going to stay and listen to me, I'm not walking here, I'm dancing, get it, I'm doing acrobatics, I don't tell my stories in order to get somewhere, I tell them for the simple pleasure of telling, no more no less, and if you're listening in order to find out what's going to happen at the end, you're wasting your time, you have to listen just for the pleasure of listening to my voice, to the dancing of my voice if you prefer…"
...&
"...writing is not what you remember but what you have forgotten… the writer makes the transition from the visible to the invisible, as he plunges into the invisibility of language, he confronts the incapacity of seizing the subject who writes, because no matter how hard one tries, the subject who writes will never be able to seize himself in what he writes, he will seize only the writing itself, which by definition excludes him…"
The chapter-long rant, where Namredef/Moinous/Federman tears the editor who rejected his manuscript a new asshole and defends literature against its postpostmodern death, and the heartfelt yet caustic finale where Our Protagonist and a one-legged soldier eviscerate the shit out of hypocritical WWII France, (oh wait... you didn't know that all of Federman's novels are essentially Holocaust novels?) puts this one over the top, for me at least. If you enjoy the samples of the writing quoted above, and if you like ASS and IMAGINARY ASSES of all kinds, and if you want to sit down at a cafe table in a charming Parisian neighborhood across from a hell of a writer, and pour a couple of Pernods and light up the first of a chain of Gauloises, and settle in and let him talk your ear off for a couple of hours, digress and digress in a wordy orbit but never really descend toward The Unforgivable Enormity at the heart of his life and the twentieth century, then drop what you're doing and start reading Federman now!

It's the New Thing, The What Comes Next, The Books of the Lingoverts, Avant Pop, The New Post-Future, Goodreads It Book of 2014, The People's Revolution Number Four, popomomo -- Damn it, it's A Time of Noodles!