This novel is printed as a facsimile of the typewritten manuscript with its experimental layouts. From the Publisher: "Double or Nothing" is a concrete novel in which the words become physical materials on the page. Federman gives each of these pages a shape or structure, most often a diagram or picture. The words move, cluster, jostle, and collide in a tour de force full of puns, parodies, and imitations. Within these startling and playful structures Federman develops two characters and two narratives. These stories are simultaneous and not chronological. The first deals with the narrator and his effort to make the book itself; the second, the story the narrator intends to tell, presents a young man's arrival in America. The narrator obsesses over making his narrative to the point of not making it. All of his choices for the story are made and remade. He tallies his accounts and checks his provisions. His questioning and indecision force the reader into another radical sense of the novel. The young man, whose story is to be told, also emerges from his obsessions. Madly transfixing details-- noodles, toilet paper, toothpaste, a first subway ride, a sock full of dollars-- become milestones in a discovery of America. These details, combined with Federman's feel for the desperation of his characters, create a book that is simultaneously hilarious and frightening. The concrete play of its language, its use of found materials, give the viewer/reader a sense of constant and strange discovery. To turn these pages is to turn the corners of a world of words as full as any novel or literary discourse ever presented. "Double or Nothing" challenges the way we read fiction and the way we see words, and in the process, gives us back more of our own world and our real dilemmas than we are used to getting."Serpil Opperman and Michael Opperman in Journal if American Studies of Turkey 3:75-93, 1996, provide an excellent analysis of this book that reads in part the following: ' It is a novel about the possibility of writing a novel, a novel which exposes its very construction process. With a remarkable display of graphical design and typographical play,Double or Nothing demonstrates the visual movement of its fictional process. It relates the story of a narrator who decides to lock himself in a room for 365 days in order to tell his own life story. This story is not presented as a piece of autobiography in a linear narrative pattern. Instead, the narrator uses a protagonist called Boris to relate the story of his survival of the Holocaust in France and his subsequent struggle for survival in America. Needless to say, this story is Federman's own: he himself survived the Holocaust in France when his mother, in a spontaneous gesture, hid him in a closet. Minutes later, Federman's entire family was deported to Auschwitz where all of them died in gas chambers. Instead of recounting this story,Double or Nothing presents itself as a series of notes "towards a fiction" (158). It concentrates on the problems of survival of the writer who has to live on a limited capital of 1200 dollars. The novel is full of calculations of how to stretch this limited amount of capital over the time-span of 365 days. Here, the writer is confronted with existential questions such as: Do I feed on noodles or potatoes if the room costs 8 dollars a week? How many squeezes go into a tube of toothpaste? How many packages of noodles do I have to buy in order to be able to survive? In other words, the writer never gets down to relating Boris's story. He gets stuck with his own concrete problems of survival, and with theoretical questions concerning the story's inherent problems of artistic representation. Again and again, the writer focuses on the question of how the story can be related, thus creating a "real fictitious discourse," as the novel's subtitle proclaims. A self-conscious novel like this cannot be summarized by a traditional "table of contents." The reader gets instead a detailed "Summary of the Discourse.' 'The novel reproduces the pattern of a discovery of a new continent in the form of a linguistic tour-de-force which challenges the boundaries between all kinds of discourses. For example, the foregrounding of concrete play erases the borderline between poetry and fiction (which is also challenged by the inclusion of a number of poems). Various "Shandean oddities" cite the tradition of the metafictional novel: Laurence Sterne's Tristram Shandy confronts the reader with black, white or marbled pages, footnotes, graphical doodlings and missing or juxtaposed chapters. Federman engages in a similar free graphic play, involving unnumbered pages and typographical arrangements that do not follow a left-to-right or line-by-line pattern.Double or Nothing also contains an unnumbered double-column page entitled "Some reflections on the novel in our time" which crosses the border between literature and criticism (a type of discourse Federman labels as "critifiction"). The reproduction of the product information on a box of noodles appears as a fictional ready-made; several strike-outs emphasize the novel's notebook character; and complex graphics in the form of question-dollar and saxophone-noodles point to the novel's last phase of production in Buffalo when typewriter and notebook were replaced by a modern computer. An unexpurgated "word for word" recording of the protagonist's thoughts in French experiments with the form of a bilingual novel, and a graphical invitation to walk together with the noodler to the cashier's window becomes a schematic fusion of text and image. A typographical play such as this seems to transform the page into a three-dimensional stage; it also adds an element of movement or dynamism to the static arrangement of the linguistic material.''All in all, the novel resembles a kind of container or an empty box of noodles into which all kinds of linguistic material can be dumped more or less spontaneously. Indeed, the entire novel relies on a series of linguistic improvisations which move in all sorts of directions, just as Allan Kaprow once described the structure of the Happening. Accordingly, the novel's ending is a highly ironical doubling upon finality and closure in conventional fiction. Indeed, if the room cost only 7 dollars a week, the end would be the beginning of another set of calculations and of yet another novel. The text points to a circular structure which is typical of the postmodern novel in general, and which, according to Kaprow, also characterizes the Happening. In fact, the novel's narrative concept can be described as a fictional take on Cage's famous composition, "4,33," which, instead of presenting an orchestral piece to an audience (waiting eagerly in a concert hall), recorded the noises of the audience during the silent "performance." Federman, instead of telling the story of his protagonist, concentrates on the noodler's calculations made during the process of writing.' -- Source of annotation: Marvin or Ruth Sackner.