[ book tip by Tim Schomacker ] Basically this book is so outstanding – let me tell you! – it should be presented here all by itself. A photo of the cover of the German edition* would be enough. With blue and red letters. This book IS simply: DOUBLE OR NOTHING. Basically you could (I could) – on the other hand – spend weeks and months describing, copying, retelling, and imitating it; or selecting the right music for it (yes, that would be an entirely suitable approach, to list the albums you might want to listen to while you’re reading DOUBLE OR NOTHING; knowing that it’s a different book if you listen to different albums while you’re reading it. But albums are crucial.); or measuring and mapping it, trying to cook a specific dish (yes, cook a specific dish, because this book has to do with noodles!), and to caress its cover. And so on. Though now there’s already more to it than nothing. Which is why it has to continue. Let’s go: we’ll begin outside the book. With a stack of typewritten pages. On them is the idea for DOUBLE OR NOTHING. Three hundred pages long. That’s the book. A record of the idea to write it. A record of the preparations required to write it. A record of the many possibilities to write it. The typewritten pages became a book for the first time in the German version (the author found the work of the translator so good, that it became the basis of the book’s next American edition – in the original). A book in which no page looks like any other. Basically, this is true of every book; but in DOUBLE OR NOTHING you can actually see this. At first glance. The words that show up most frequently in this book are:  “perhaps”, “for instance”, “questions” – and of course “noodles”. For that’s what the book is about (can you say that it’s about something?): in any case there are calculations of how many boxes of noodles you need so as to be able to stay in a room for a year and record this life story (or at least one vision of it). And there are lists: of possible names for the protagonist and the other characters. And of types of noodles. Everything in the life of the main character (who has different names) appears to DOUBLE details from the life of this guy Raymond Federman, whose name is on the binding and title page. OR NOTHING. That he was born in France. That he survived the Shoah only because his mother pushed him into a closet on the landing during a raid (this closet is mentioned in every book with the name Raymond Federman on its binding or title page); the period during the war on a farm in the French provinces, the crossing to America, the uncle who takes him to Detroit, the time spent at the car factory, the saxophone he begins to play, New York, the army, being a writer. The plan to record the story of his life. And the book telling about this plan.

[ book info ] Federman, Raymond: Double or Nothing. (original language: English) Fiction Collective, Alabama, 1999 . ISBN: 1573660752.