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.