The Voice in the Closet [Paperback]

Raymond Federman (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: February 1987

Fiction. In occupied France, an adolescent boy, pushed into a closet as his family is taken by Nazi soldiers, accidentally escapes the death camps. As an adult, "Federman," at once the novelist himself and a literary character, wonders what it means to re-tell this experience, if it can be re-told, or if the reduction of one's story or life to a single moment isn't the greatest of all horrors. Since its initial publication in 1979, THE VOICE IN THE CLOSEThas been hailed as one of the great experiments of prose ficiton: a single sentence, concrete recit of wrenching emotional impact. The new bilingual edition of the text features French and English versions newly revised by the author, with an introduction by Gerard Bucher and an end note by Theodore Pelton.

--This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The Voice in the Closet astonishes.... [N]othing in his previous work prepares us for the obsessive immediateness of this. -- Peter Quartermain, Chicago Review --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

Language Notes

Text: English, French --This text refers to an alternate Paperback edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: Natl Book Network (February 1987)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0930956052
• ISBN-13: 978-0930956059
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #10,859,580 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Undiscovered Classic, January 8, 2008

By 

T. Pelton (Buffalo, NY) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Voice in the Closet (Paperback)

I held my tongue for a long time, but I can no longer allow one awful review represent this amazing book. This book is not about a simple "good read". You will have to work at it. But I feel it is one of the major works of world literature of the second half of the twentieth century. No joke. It forms the core of all of the other novels of Federman, directly (though chaotically) representing the most critically symbolic moment in Federman's self-created autobiography, when he was pushed into a family closet as a young boy and escaped while the rest of his family was rounded up and sent to their deaths at Auschwitz.

Federman is relatively ignored in the US, where he has made his home since the 1950s. In France, he is considered a major writer. In Germany, his books have been made into radio plays and theatre. In all, his more than 20 books have been translated into nearly as many languages.

This is an intense, dense, single-sentence, rambling, obsessive text. But it features in the form of ore, needing to be mined out, the most basic essence of all of Federman's work -- the feeling that a writer in a sense betrays a part of him or herself in making a part of their life a story, an object for consumption. And yet, the story must be told -- to not tell it would also be a crime. Federman's stories always frustrate their own tellings, but for good reason. Storytelling is not an innocent act, though it is a necessary one.

Dense and obsessive, yes. But it is also, in like manner to his mentor Samuel Beckett's late texts, compressed and brief -- less than 20 pages. This is a text that rewards repeated readings, and allows them.

I recommend this book very hiughly to anyone who is interested in contemporary literature, and particularly those of you for whom Raymond Federman is yet an unknown quantity. You should know about him -- and will find his complete saga captivating.

1 of 12 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars A miserable waste of time., November 24, 2005

By 

emo "emo" (buffalo) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Voice in the Closet (Paperback)

A miserable waste of time. Only the publisher, who sadly is trying to hawk his own self published mediocre writing has anything good to say about this meager and pretentious paragraph.