Raymond Federman's Posthumous Novel 'Les carcasses' Explores Death and Transmutation

Raymond Federman's posthumous novel 'Les carcasses' was published by Éditions Léo Scheer just days before his death last month. The narrative imagines dead bodies waiting in a non-religious purgatory before being transmuted into another being—human, animal, or object. The carcasses revolt, wanting a say in their transmutations, and hesitate on how to convince the authorities, who discover that human and animal carcasses maintain dubious sexual relations that could give birth to 'homofaunes.' The novel questions boundaries between humanity and animality, the living and the dead, and is described as a philosophical tale in the style of Voltaire, renewed with alertness and gravity. Federman's earlier work 'Dans la Fourrure de ma tante Rachel,' reissued simultaneously, recounts his life as a Jewish child who escaped the Vel' d'Hiv roundup and lived on a farm, focusing on family relationships and using wordplay and digressions to delay painful scenes. Federman believed that being a survivor is a joy that liberates one from all responsibilities.