Afloat (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781590172599)

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.

Author: Guy de Maupassant
ISBN-10: 1590172590
ISBN-13: 9781590172599
Publisher: New York Review of Books
Language: English
Published: 04/29/2008
Pages: 120
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.33lbs
Size: 7.94h x 5.04w x 0.38d

Review Citation(s):
New York Review of Books 02/26/2009 pg. 33
London Review of Books 11/05/2009 pg. 25