Customer Reviews

Afloat

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As a sailor I read this little book like reading a yacht's log book. The device is fresh and alive. Much of how he wrote it captures the feeling of being with him on that yacht with the wind taking Guy, you and a wide range of thoughts anywhere on a whim. You are always brought back to the "Bel-Ami" itself to move forward-book as yacht. It has been said that to understand the French you had to read Guy de Maupassant. Well, to understand the spirit of the sailing life it doesn't hurt to read him either. Delightful.

Slim book of essays written during a sailing journey, the tone ranges from beautiful, poetic descriptions of the ocean, weather, islands, and coastlines to--at the drop of a hat--hilarious rants against humanity. Imagine a colicky Thoreau and you've got the idea. Well worth the journey: sharply observed sketches of our world a century ago but as timely and accurate in its depictions of human conflict as anything written today.

a wonderous interplay between sea and society, poorGuy he craved society yet it anoyed him. he seems happiest talking about the sea and gossiping. his meditations are a good read take it with you on a criuse, l did

I have just reread with great pleasure Guy de Maupassant's compact logbook Afloat, which purports to chronicle nine days aboard his yacht Bel-Ami in spring 1887, as he and his two-man crew set sail from Antibes. However, the title is a bit misleading as, thanks to the weather, Maupassant spends more time ashore than afloat. However, the 100-page memoir actually takes place neither at sea nor on land but in the fertile consciousness of the famed writer, where his musings and ironic commentary drift beguilingly from French history to Parisian society, from architecture to death; from tuberculosis to war, from mobocracy to friendship. But always built on a foundation of enchanting and evocative descriptions of nature--the sea, the sky, the wind, the mountains, and the land.

Afloat enables a rare, direct connection with the author for fans of Maupassant, like me. Over the years I have read and reread all his hundreds of short stories in translation, often keeping an anthology bedside. In the past year I read for the first time his 1885 novel Bel-Ami (his yacht's namesake), which compares favorably with other noted 19th century young-provincial-seeks-fortune-in-Paris novels: Stendhal's The Red and the Black (1830), Flaubert's A Sentimental Education (1869) and, my favorite, Balzac's Père Goriot (1834). However, in Maupassant's voluminous short fiction, the author per se is seldom visible (though Bel-Ami is seemingly autobiographic to large degree.) He writes with a sharp eye and keen ear not only of Parisian society but also of provincial petite bourgeoisie, peasants, and sportsmen, always with clarity and heart but sans sentimentality, and always focused on the consciousnesses of his characters and, at times, his narrator, not of the author. So here, in Afloat, we glimpse Guy on a busman's holiday of sorts: a writer still writing but without the curtain of form and story that generally conceals him.

Thus we get here from Maupassant a very funny description of royalty worship in Cannes, both cynicism and lyricism as his moods swing with the weather and his migraines, a vicious indictment of war, and a penetrating exposé of the tortures of being a hypersensitive fiction writer who views and catalogues life solely as source material. We find thoughtful digressions on peasants, love, land speculation, friendship, and the perils of office work. Along the way we also come to appreciate his considerable good sense, his iconoclastic wisdom and his well-wrought credo. We get to know him as a man as well as an author, sharing with him a fortifying voyage I will likely take again.

Also worthwhile here is the informative introduction (best read, liked most introductions, after reading the book) by translator Douglas Parmée. His 2008 English rendering of Sur l'eau captures Maupassant's subtle wit, informality and directness of expression that often escaped earlier translators of his work.

"Afloat" does not resemble anything else written by Maupassant. It is a true story (as indicated at the end) and is based on his personal travel. It has some amusing descriptions of the French Reviera and Monaco, but also contains some grim philosophical thoughts that explain some things about Maupassant, not the least of which is why he ended up in a mental hospital.

I read a review in the monthly magazine from Boat US that indicated a good nautical read. This book was a bummer on wheels. Too heavy, the author wrote it and then killed himself by not treating a case of syfiliis. hit yourself repeatedly with a hammer, you would have more fun