Afloat

Guy de Maupassant (1850-1893), journalist, novelist, poet, memoirist, playwright, and short-story writer, was one of the most notable men of letters of nineteenth-century France. He was born in Normandy to a middle-class family that had adopted the noble "de" prefix only a generation earlier. An indifferent student, Maupassant enlisted in the army during the Franco-Prussian war—staying only long enough to acquire an intense dislike for all things military—and then went on to a career as a civil servant. His entrée into the literary world was eased by Gustave Flaubert, who had been a childhood playmate of his mother's and who took the young man under his wing, introducing him into salon society. The bulk of Maupassant's published works, including nearly three hundred short stories and six novels, were written between 1880 and 1890, a period in which he also contributed to several Parisian daily newspapers. Among his best-known works are the novels Bel-Ami and Pierre and Jean and the fantastic tale La Horla; above all, he is celebrated for his stories, which transformed and defined the genre for years. In 1892, after attempting suicide to escape the hallucinations and headaches brought on by syphilis, Maupassant was committed to an asylum. He died eighteen months later. »

Douglas Parmée (1914-2008), a lifetime fellow of Queens College, Cambridge, has translated works by Flaubert, Zola, Baudelaire, and Chamfort, among others, including the NYRB Classics titles, The Child by Jules Vallès and Afloat by Guy de Maupassant. He is a past winner of the Society of Authors Scott-Moncrieff Prize for French translation. »

By Guy de Maupassant
Translated and with an introduction by Douglas Parmée

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.

Reviews

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

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 writes thoughts such as were suggested by the rocking of the waves.
— The New York Times

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

Maupassant is a heart-stopping writer. Like all the best travel books, Afloat embraces reflections on a variety of subjects unconnected with travel. It has spontaneity, gaiety and freshness.
— Daily Telegraph

Also see:

Alien Hearts
By Guy de Maupassant
Translated from the French and with a preface by Richard Howard

Maupassant's last completed novel is the story of three lovers bound by bitterness and infatuation. Richard Howard's new English translation of this complex and brooding psychological novel reveals the final, unexpected flowering of the great French realist's art.

Format: Paperback
Retail Price: $14.00
Price: $10.50 (25% off)

Apr 29, 2008
128 pages
ISBN: 159017259
9781590172599
Biography & Memoir
All Literature in Translation
NYRB Classics
Literature in French

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Afloat

By Guy de Maupassant Translated and with an introduction by Douglas Parmée

Reviews

Also see:

By Guy de Maupassant
Translated and with an introduction by Douglas Parmée