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Afloat
Afloat
Afloat
Ebook165 pages2 hours

Afloat

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

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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.
LanguageEnglish
PublisherJovian Press
Release dateNov 22, 2017
ISBN9781537824277
Afloat
Author

Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant was a French writer and poet considered to be one of the pioneers of the modern short story whose best-known works include "Boule de Suif," "Mother Sauvage," and "The Necklace." De Maupassant was heavily influenced by his mother, a divorcée who raised her sons on her own, and whose own love of the written word inspired his passion for writing. While studying poetry in Rouen, de Maupassant made the acquaintance of Gustave Flaubert, who became a supporter and life-long influence for the author. De Maupassant died in 1893 after being committed to an asylum in Paris.

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Rating: 4.043478260869565 out of 5 stars
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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    A quasi-fictional travelogue? Regardless of what's true or not Maupassant's writing and observational skills are as impressive as ever here. It's probably only recommended for dedicated fans of the author, but such people find some very nice passages here. A short read and definitely worth it.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    A marvellous work, an account of a voyage GDM made on his yacht along the coast of the South of France with his two hired sailors. His most personal work, in which the author comes closest to the reader, perhaps because it's plotless, and the narrator gives himself time to dream, to rant, and reflect. It contains matchless descriptions of the sea and the South of France, and amazing confessional stuff, in which Mauppassant comes across as a precursor to all the modern confessional writing of French lit: the Celines, the Cendrars. It contains Maupassant's famous rant against militarism and war, his reaction to the sack of Paris by the Germans in the 1870-71 Franco Prussian war. Here's a snippet:Men of war are the scourge of humanity. We fight against nature, against ignorance, against all sorts of obstacles to mitigate the evils of our miserable existence. There are men, philanthropists, learned men, who spend their whole lives toiling to discover how to help, support, relieve their brother mortals... then along comes a war, and in six months, the generals have destroyed the work of twenty years of patient effort...An incredible work, one to turn to again and again.

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Afloat - Guy de Maupassant

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