Synopses & Reviews
A Floating Life will delight lovers of Kafka, Murakami, and the magic realism of Gabriel García Márquez. 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 narrators breast feeding of the baby he has birthed.
"Equal parts science fiction, magic realism, and hard-boiled detective story, A Floating Life is a dizzying journey . . . a seamless, spellbinding narrative in the lineage of Borges, Castaneda, and Philip K. Dick."—Kenneth Goldsmith, author of Uncreative Writing
Review
"Talking bears, talking dogs, time travel and a mid-life crisis: Tad Crawford's brilliantly original and entertaining first novel, A Floating Life, brings South American magical realism to 21st-century America in a mesmerizing story of one man's search through the realms of myth, history, and the human psyche to explore love, friendship, family ties, vocation and, in the end, what it means to live in an ultimately mysterious universe. Tad Crawford is an utterly fearless writer who will and does go wherever his wonderfully anarchic imagination takes him." Howard Frank Mosher
Review
"By turns charming and ominous, whimsical and philosophical, A Floating Life is a multi-layered, shape-shifting miracle of a first novel." Melvin Jules Bukiet
Review
"Throughout this fantastical saga of privation, like Odysseus’s voyage without a homecoming, like Dante’s tour without a guide or a Beatrice, Crawford’s narrator recounts his amazing adventures in a mesmerizing diction of long-suffering cool. His losses are nearly total: spouse, child, occupation, property, potency, clothes (repeatedly), safety, and friends. In the end, in his memory and ours, we are left an account of magical encounters with imaginary creatures: a litigious dachshund, a terrifyingly helpful bear, a man called Pecheur who doesn’t fish (men or fish). They cannot save him – often, indeed, they imperil him – but they can enchant our world. They did mine." Nelson W. Aldrich, Jr.
Review
"At times, Crawford seems to be channeling Kafka or Borges… Odd, offbeat and strangely shimmering." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"A haunting, unusual, sui generis, and wonderfully sustained novel that also manages to be hilarious. I loved it." Nick Lyons
Review
"In Crawford’s world, boundaries, especially those between people, are semipermeable membranes with tenuous connections to reality.
At times, Crawford seems to be channeling Kafka or Borges, a feeling reinforced when, at a party his unnamed narrator engages a vaguely familiar woman in conversation. She informs her interlocutor that she’s written a letter to her husband, outlining his deficiencies and the hopelessness of their marriage. The narrator finally figures out whom he’s talking to—his wife. Equally dreamlike sequences emerge from this one. The couple decides to live in separate bedrooms in their apartment, but when this turns out to be unfeasible, the narrator goes to look for a new place to live. The real estate agent he talks to firmly rejects some of the narrator’s choices and eventually tells him he’d be happy in a small efficiency, but the building is being constructed under this apartment, deep in the ground, so in a surreal way, the apartment is actually a penthouse. One of the most important connections the narrator makes is to The Floating World, a weird and elusive shop where one can buy model ships, something the narrator starts to develop an intense interest in. The shop is located in a brownstone with no identifying marks, and its proprietor is a Dutchman who goes by the nautical name of Pecheur. Over time, the narrator and the shopkeeper become quite close, the latter taking on the narrator as an assistant. In addition to the death of Pecheur, the narrator ultimately must also confront his erectile dysfunction as well as the dilemma of waking up in an infirmary where he breastfeeds an infant, rather unusual since the narrator is a man.
Odd, offbeat, and strangely shimmering." Kirkus Reviews
Review
"Crawford’s mastery of slowly revealing the content of a chapter, combined with his skillful description of landscape and character, adds reality to an essentially surreal narrative. . . .The elements of the picaresque and magic realism, blended with quirky, surreal humor, should appeal to readers with a taste for the literary and the strange." Booklist
Synopsis
“Equal parts science fiction, magic realism, and hard-boiled detective story, A Floating Life is a dizzying journey through a fragmented landscape of ideas deftly rendered into a seamless, spellbinding narrative in the lineage of Borges, Castaneda, and Philip K. Dick.”—Kenneth Goldsmith, author of I'll Be Your Mirror
Synopsis
“Equal parts science fiction, magic realism, and hard-boiled detective story, A Floating Life is a dizzying journey through a fragmented landscape of ideas deftly rendered into a seamless, spellbinding narrative in the lineage of Borges, Castaneda, and Philip K. Dick.”—Kenneth Goldsmith, author of I'll Be Your Mirror
About the Author
Tad Crawford grew up in the artists' colony of Woodstock, New York. He is the author of many nonfiction books and his writing has appeared in venues such as Art in America, the Café Irreal, Confrontation, Communication Arts, Family Circle, Glamour, Guernica, the Nation, and Writer's Digest. The founder and publisher of Allworth Press, he lives in New York City.