A nameless narrator awakens to the muddle of middle age, no longer certain who or what he is. He finds himself at a party talking to a woman he doesn't know who proves to be his wife. Soon separated but still living in the same apartment, he is threatened by a litigious dachshund and saddled with a stubborn case of erectile dysfunction in a world that seems held together by increasingly mercurial laws and elusive boundaries. His relationship deepens with an elderly Dutch model maker named Pecheur whose miniature boats are erratically offered for sale in a hard-to-find shop called The Floating World. Enlivened by Pecheur's dream to tame the destructive forces of nature, the narrator begins to find his bearings.
With quiet humor and wisdom, A Floating Life charts its course among images that surprise and disorient, such as a job interview in a steam room with a one-eyed, seven-foot-tall chef, a midnight intrusion of bears, and the narrator’s breast feeding of the baby he has birthed.
From Amazon Description
I often read blogs, in
which writers give advice to other writers. Some of the advice is
good, some of it obvious and some of it suggests the writer has not
read many books. One example of the latter sort of advice is “Don’t
write about dreams.” Clearly that person has not read Lewis
Carroll. And nor have s/he read Tad Crawford’s A Floating Life.
Like Alice in
Wonderland the whole of Crawford’s book has a dreamlike quality.
There are dreams in the book, but which sections are the central
character’s dreams and which not is not always clear. As a bear
says at one point “I spent a lot of time imagining who the
dreams might belong to. Finally, I thought of you.”
Yes I did say “bear”.
During the course of the book the narrator meets with a family of
bears who live under Central Park, a litigious dachsund, Numun, an
estate agent who offers him a golden cage in a building which is
being built downwards, a World War II Japanese soldier and a modern
Charon and Cerberus (and more as the Amazon description makes clear). As magic realism goes this is definitely on the
magical/surrealist side. The dreams are edgy and often disturbing.
There were times when I was reminded of the short stories of Karen
Heuler.
The book does have
realist elements. The narrator seems to be living a normal life
working in marketing with a wife who is fed up with the fact that he
hasn’t matured and who has decided to leave him. But even these
elements are dealt with in a dreamlike way – he has a conversation
with his wife at a party without recognizing her or apparently she
him. The most realistic element is perhaps Pecheur and his model shop
A Floating Life. The fantastic maritime scenes Pecheur displays are explained as computer programmed, engineered, modelled, although I doubt such programming is possible in real life. But Pecheur's displays have
significance for the dreams and magic that follow.
I enjoyed this unusual
book. It is strewn with symbolism - Jung would have had a field day.
On writing this review I realise that I really ought to read it again
to see what more I can find.
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