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.
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