1 1

Afloat

Afloat

by Guy de Maupassant, translated and with an introduction by Douglas Parmée

$15.95
$0.00 $15.95
Biography & Memoir French Literature International Literature
Format

Finalist of The French-American Foundation and
The Florence Gould Foundation's
Best English Translation of French Prose in Fiction

Afloat 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, polemic, and documentation in a wholly original manner. 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—at once happily and precariously—afloat.

Afloat courts risk in both form and content, making itself up as it goes along. As a work of art, it is as fresh and startling as the paintings of Maupassant's great contemporaries van Gogh and Gauguin.by Guy de Maupassant, translated and with an introduction by Douglas Parmee

Additional Book Information

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590172599
Pages: 128
Publication Date:

Praise

Douglas Parmée's fresh new translation brings to light a book that, more so than any of his renowned short stories, shows Maupassant the man, as he might have been known to contemporary readers of his copious journalism in fin de siècle Paris. Recounting a short week spent yachting on the French Riviera, Maupassant's fictionalized memoir crystallizes the mixed motives that lead to so many of our vacations. He is at once cynical and Romantic; he is a misanthrope who can't get enough of man; he is a sophisticated raconteur who wants to talk to himself for a while.
— Benjamin Lytal, The New York Sun

Maupassant describes—very beautifully—what he found essential in his cruise: the wind, the sounds, the odours, the mountains, the islands, and the effect they had on him and on his imagination...He can be compassionate, ecstatic about nature, jaundiced, cynical, arrogant, anguished. His diatribe against war is superb.
— Times Literary Supplement

In M. Guy de Maupassant's Afloat, there is a good deal that is graceful and suggestive, besides the strictly descriptive passages, in which the French writer's skill is always noticeable. The book records the indolent pleasures of a summer cruise from Antibes to Monaco in a little yacht, the Bel Ami (a decidedly significant name to persons familiar with M. de Maupassant as a novelist) and pictures of the coast, of smooth and squally days, reflections, philosophical and other, and a hundred pretty trifles of thought and diction are united in it. It is very light and very pleasant reading.
— The Independent (UK)

M. de Maupassant gives one delightful notes and jottings of a leisurely voyage in a roomy and comfortable yacht, appropriately called the "Bel-Ami," along the Riviera coast...the successive papers in the little book are exquisitely enjoyable reading.
— The Independent

View full details

  • Shopping for someone else but not sure what to give them? Give them the gift of choice with a New York Review Books Gift Card.

    Gift Cards 

  • A membership for yourself or as a gift for a special reader will promise a year of good reading.

    Join NYRB Classics Book Club 

  • Is there a book that you’d like to see back in print, or that you think we should consider for one of our series? Let us know!

    Tell us about it