Afloat

Afloat, originally published as Sur l'eau in 1888, is a book of dazzling but treacherously shifting currents, a seemingly simple logbook of a sailing cruise along the French Mediterranean coast that opens up to reveal unexpected depths, as Guy de Maupassant merges fact and fiction, dream and documentation in a wholly original style. Humorous and troubling stories, unreliable confessions, stray reminiscences, and thoughts on life, love, art, nature, and society all find a place in Maupassant's pages, which are, in conception and in effect, so many reflections of the fluid sea on which he finds himself-happily but forever precariously-afloat. Afloat is thus a book that in both content and form courts risk while setting out to chart the meaning, and limits, of freedom, a book that makes itself up as it goes along and in doing so proves as startling and compellingly vital as the paintings of Maupassant's contemporaries van Gogh and Gauguin.

Binding Type: Paperback
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Published: 04/29/2008
ISBN: 9781590172599
Pages: 120
Weight: 0.33lbs
Size: 7.94h x 5.04w x 0.38d

Review Citations: New York Review of Books 02/26/2009 pg. 33
London Review of Books 11/05/2009 pg. 25