Here begins the trend of me reviewing books published by the New York Review of Books. I can confirm that the next few reviews will be under this publisher. Their covers are amazing and they offer great overlooked books and new translations and I've never been let down by the contents of their titles. Today we are going to be talking about Guy de Maupassant's Afloat. One of his very short travel novels.You could read this in an afternoon over coffee. Afloat is a travel diary of a man and two sailors going down the Cote d'Azur (The Azure Coast, or French Mediterranean). I'm very much a lover of travel and a Francophile, so this book struck several chords for me. I first heard of Guy de Maupassant through his short stories, of which he wrote hundreds but the most well known being Le Horla (itself an inspiration to H.P. Lovecraft's 'Call of Cthulhu') and The Necklace. Both of these short stories appeared in my High School English textbooks throughout the years.
Guy de Maupassant was born Henri René Albert Guy de Maupassant in Tourville-sur-Arques, a township in the Normandy Region of France. He surname "de Maupassant" indicates nobility, as his mother had urged his father to get permission to style his name as such. His father was domestically abusive, and his mother left when Guy we eleven. This was a bigger deal than it was today because divorce was a social disgrace in the 19th century. His mother sent both Maupassant and his brother to boarding school for classical studies. Unable to stand this, Maupassant got himself expelled before he could graduate. When entering Junior High, Maupassant was encouraged by his mother to make himself known with Gustave Flaubert. The breakout of the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 had him move to Paris and worked for ten years as a clerk for the French Navy. Gustave Flaubert took him under his wing and encouraged Guy's debut in journalism and literature. He introduced him to several well known authors of the period, including Ivan Turgenev (who we will cover later). In 1880 Guy published Boule de Suif, what is considered the first of his masterpieces. From that point on, Guy was explosively productive. Producing two to four volumes annually. Guy become wealthy very quickly. To give you a measure of his success, his second novel, Bel Ami in 1885 that thirty-five printings in just FOUR months. Guy, despite being in the in circles of French celebrities, had little care for society, and was naturally more at home travelling, preferring solitude and meditation, a common theme in the novel we are reviewing today. Hilariously, Guy de Maupassant hated the Eiffel Tower, and ate frequently at the cafe at its base as it was the only place he didn't have to look at it. Sadly, Guy de Maupassant developed a deep fear of death and paranoia of persecution caused by worsening syphilis symptoms, which he may have had congenially. Trying to slit his own throat, Guy was put in an institution where he died in 1893. Guy wrote his own epitaph which reads; "I have coveted everything and taken pleasure in nothing". So really a dramatic guy.
Afloat is a travel novel, a roman a clef of sorts. It details a week long cruise down the Cote d'Azur on the yacht the Bel Ami, which was Maupassant's real life yacht that he named after his most famous novel. The narrator is unnamed, but is clearly a stand in for Maupassant. Afloat is not quite a proper title, as for most of the novel they are docked and waylayed by bad winds or weather. Each day is broken down by the towns they visit. Setting off from Antibes, to Cannes, Agay, Saint Raphael, and finally Saint Tropez. The real person Afloat is Guy himself. The novel quickly becomes a treatise on his philosophy on several subjects. It's surprisingly relevant too, as in Cannes he shows disdain for the celebrity culture there, everyone obsessed with being or being around French nobility. I found this interesting as a tie to our own celebrity worship culture in the New Tens, but hilariously Cannes is still this way. It's a hotbed for the rich and famous. Some things never change really. In Afloat Guy explores love, death, modern society, war, history, and poetry. Just as Guy waxes about these philosophical subjects of these towns, so too does he go into the actual histories of them. Reading Afloat is not only a treat for the introspection to Guy's mind, but also for the travel reader for the loving descriptions of the Cote d'Azur and her people, and for the historic Fracophile.
Guy de Maupassant was an extremely prolific writer. He wrote near three hundred short stories, six novels, three travel books (of which this is one), and a volume of verse. Still though, Afloat remains among my favorites for its true to life origins. Ernest Hemingway once said "All good books are alike in that they are truer than if they had really happened and after you are finished reading one you will feel that all that happened to you and afterwards it all belongs to you: the good and the bad, the ecstasy, the remorse and sorrow, the people and the places and how the weather was. If you can get so that you can give that to people, then you are a writer." That is certainly true of Afloat, as it brings with it not only the soul of Maupassant, but the soul of France as a whole. Leaving me nostalgic for a place that no longer exists as portrayed here. Afloat is a masterpiece of human consciousness, and, as its only a real life account of Guy's cruise down the French coast, a testament to his skill as a master of prose.
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