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A Floating Life
- A Novel
- Narrated by: Phil Kane
- Length: 6 hrs and 49 mins
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A Floating Life
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Editor reviews
Lovers of fiction have to trust the story as told. Following the tradition of Kafka and Marquez, author Tad Crawford thrusts his audience into a magical realm in A Floating Life. A man awakens in another time, unsure of his own identity. He is married to a woman he does not know, is at odds with a dog, cannot achieve an erection, and does not know how to get by in his new environment. The aged Pecheur is a maker of miniature boats who has an urge to tame nature. Pecheur’s mission moves the nameless narrator to take possession of his life. A crop of odd characters and images substantiate this disorienting landscape. Phil Kane’s canny, straight-man narration pulls the listener in.
Summary
A Floating Life will delight lovers of Kafka, Murakami, and the magic realism of Gabriel Garca Mrquez.
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.