Free Floating - Plot Summary

Plot Summary

Khlebnikov's "humor of the everyday" asks us to look again at the world about us. Lyonya's work at the local factory and his hoped–for career disappears when the plant is taken over by 'the Americans' and closed down. He becomes a regular visitor to the employment office and attempts a variety of dead end jobs — shoe seller in a market, plasterer, road crew. He eventually meets a woman he went to school with and after a bad start, gets things on the right track. Set in a small town on the Volga, where enthusiasm for anything seems somewhat relaxed, hardly anything actually happens, but through Khlebnikov's quirky, absurdist observation — a picture of Chuck Norris on a workbench, trying on shoes, a woman peeling a boiled egg, the creaking door of the employment office — we come to know the floating life.

Read more about this topic:  Free Floating

Famous quotes containing the words plot and/or summary:

    “There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
    —Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    “I have simplified my politics into an utter detestation of all existing governments; and, as it is the shortest and most agreeable and summary feeling imaginable, the first moment of an universal republic would convert me into an advocate for single and uncontradicted despotism. The fact is, riches are power, and poverty is slavery all over the earth, and one sort of establishment is no better, nor worse, for a people than another.”
    —George Gordon Noel Byron (1788–1824)