Afloat by Guy De Maupassant

Afloat by Guy De Maupassant

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.

Guy de Maupassant was born in Normandy in 1850. At 20 he served in the Franco-Prussian War, then studied writing with his mother's friend Gustav Flaubert (perhaps believing rumors, which persist, that Flaubert was his father). In 1880 he published his first story, Boule de Suif, which was hailed as a masterpiece. He quit his civil service job and soon published the collection, La Maison Tellier. He would go on to publish 300 stories and six novels, including Bel-Ami and Pierre et Jean, while living the life of a bon vivant. In the late 1880s, however, he began to show signs of syphilitic mental illness, and in 1891, was institutionalized after a suicide attempt. He died in a mental asylum in 1893.

Charlotte Mandell has won the Modern Language Association Prize in translation. Among other titles she has translated for The Art of the Novella series are Marcel Proust's The Lemoine Affair, Guy de Maupassant's The Horla, and Gustave Flaubert's A Simple Heart.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781590172599
ISBN 10	1590172590
Title	Afloat
Author	Guy De Maupassant
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The New York Review of Books, Inc
Year published	2008-04-29
Number of pages	120
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.