Barnacle Love

June 21, 2010
In De Sa's debut, a father and son narrate a revelatory, if disjointed, story spanning two generations of Portuguese-Canadian immigrants. Escaping the abuse and overbearing expectations of his mother as well as a pedophile priest, young Manuel Rebelo flees his small Portuguese village on a fishing boat in 1954, finding his promised land in St. John, Newfoundland. Through a number of trials, including a near-drowning at sea, betrayal by his rescuers, and the threat of deportation, Manuel pursues the ghost of his father (who died at sea) and an apparition Manuel calls Big Lips, a fish who appears in times of need and contemplation. Leaping ahead to the 1970s, readers find Manuel married with two children, and living in Toronto's Portuguese neighborhood. From there, Manuel's six-year-old son, Antonio, takes over the narration, precociously chronicling his father's descent into alcoholism, disillusionment, and bitterness. The sudden change in narration underscores the novel's general sense of disorientation; readers will likely find Manuel's journey from victimized altar boy to villainous father jarring, as if, in the confusion, De Sa left out part of the story.

July 1, 2010

Linked episodes in the life of an émigré from a Portuguese fishing community in the Azores trace bitter legacies through three generations.

Barnacle love, meaning painfully conflicted passion—powerfully realized in the image of a marriage bed strewn with glass and barnacle shells in the title story—is the emotion that haunts Canadian De Sa's dark, lyrical, sparely evoked sequence of tales, a finalist for the Giller Prize. Complicated connections between parents and children mark several stories, notably "Of God and Cod," in which central figure Manuel Rebelo, favored by his harsh mother over his siblings, escapes the mid-Atlantic island of his birth and is almost drowned. Rescue will lead to romance, then a revelation of deception, in "Reason to Blame," and as Manuel's life unravels, so new disappointments occur. The title story explains his marriage to Georgina, not his first choice. And the volume's second half, narrated by his son Antonio, exposes the parents' unhappiness and Manuel's financial failure. "Senhor Canada" observes Manuel and Antonio on Canada Day, the father drunk and sentimentally patriotic, the son consumed with shame. Sometimes overemphatic, the narrative sequence is threaded with themes and symbols: broken glass, suspicions of the church, "good hurt," the need to escape. Manuel's frustration and despair reach their apogee in "Mr. Wong Presents Jesus," in which tragedy hovers on Christmas Eve.

Intense, melancholy, occasionally overworked, De Sa's brooding debut illumines displacement and despair with glinting literary highlights.

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Starred review from July 1, 2010
A novel divided into two distinct halves ordinarily suffers from problems due to the interruption in the narrative. Not so here; the two parts of this intelligent yet passionate novel merge seamlessly into a double-layered, twice as effective, doubly meaningful story, which is usually what is intended by such a structure, but which in other authors hands, too often fails to materialize. Granted, the theme is not new: the emigrant-immigrant experience from Europe to the New World. But the particular circumstances that De Sa creates in which to let these experiences play out, as well as his presentation of a deeply flawed main character nevertheless performing the heroic act of leaving home for an unforeseen future, give the tale its distinctiveness. As a young man, Manuel Rebelo leaves his hometown on the Azores Islands (a territory of Portugal), embarking on a fishing boat to flee the confinement of his limited prospects. He jumps ship in Nova Scotia, eventually settling down in Toronto with his wife and family to do what immigrants always intend: to seek a better life. Bringing family history full circle, and in the process cementing the novels two halves, Manuel impresses his confinement on his son, who, in turn, wants to make his escape, in this instance from the Portuguese neighborhood of Toronto. A beautiful musical piece stating and repeating its profoundly moving melody.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2010, American Library Association.)