 Go to Southeastern France, Côte d'Azur, or the Mediterranean  Browse other Biography & Memoir A-L
 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. "In this deceptively simple way, he is a heart-stopping writer...like all the best travel books, it embraces reflectins on a variety of subjects unconnected with travel...It has spontaneity, gaiety and freshness."
--Sara Wheeler, Daily Telegraph "M. De Maupassant writes thoughts such as were suggested by the rocking of the waves."
--The New York Times  Paperback 105 pages - (4/08)
ZC2590 Afloat $14.00
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