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.

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