Barnacle Love

By Anthony De Sa

Book Overview

"Immense emotional and truthful power."-- Colm T?ib?n, author of Nora Webster

Anthony De Sa makes his fiction debut with this stunning collection of interlinked stories that explore the innocent dreams and bitter disappointments of the immigrant experience. Hailed as "tender and raw, morbid and surprisingly gentle" by the Vancouver Sun, Barnacle Love was a finalist for Canada's highly prestigious Giller Prize.

Moving from a small Portuguese fishing village in the Azores to the shores of Newfoundland, Barnacle Love then takes us into the dark alleys of Toronto's Portuguese community in the 1970s. The first half of the book is told by Manuel Rebelo, who has fled his homeland--and the crushing weight of his mother's expectations--to build a future for himself in a new land. Manuel struggles hard to adjust, but fulfilling the promise of his adopted home is not as simple as he had hoped. The second half of the book is told with candor by Manuel's son Antonio, who--along with his sister and mother--lives in the shadows cast by Manuel's failures.

With fantastic, sometimes magical details and passionate empathy, Anthony De Sa invites readers into the lives of the Rebelo family. The results are, in the words of writer Nino Ricci, "haunting and elegiac."

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1565129261
• ISBN13: 9781565129269
• Release Date: August 2010
• Publisher: Algonquin Books
• Length: 224 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.4" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

Chestnuts and fava bean folklore

Saudades is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness. This was the feeling I got when I read Anthony De Sa's book called Barnacle Love. Anthony De Sa is a Canadian author who writes about the Portuguese experience as told to him by his Iberian entourage who survived the immigrant experience from the Azores. His book Barnacle Love is a great expenditure in world literature and one to be proud as Portuguese of any decent, no matter how diluted your roots are from the source of your ancestry. It is a testament to their origins. It is apropos to call the book Barnacle Love. Barnacles are some of the oldest living organisms in the ocean with thick shells and are vulnerable inside. They attach themselves to hard surfaces and don't budge from there. The Portuguese spirit is the same. When they are transfixed on an idea, they stay glued from the constant beating barrage of waves that come from the ocean. Be it faith or tradition they will not move. They don't want to let go. The ocean being the world of ideas tries to pull them to the sea. With no avail they stay true to their convictions. Fixed they are and they shall remain. Books are vessels for your brain to traverse from one place to another. Your destination can be a place of gratification or just plain exhaustion from frustration. Barnacle Love is unique because it speaks of the Azorean culture within Canada. There are not too many books on the spirit of the Azores. Anthony De Sa is a brilliant writer of ideas. His book is short of being called a novella. It is many stories combined to make one whole story. The book can be daunting at times with some fragmented meshing of these little tales like a tapestry that is interwoven into a bigger picture. It's as though there were many ideas for books within one book and stripped down to make a whole cohesive story. I admire Barnacle Love for the visual poetic images the book is framed from. It is a very important book for the Azorean individual and should be read. The immigrant theme is what binds the book together. Barnacle Love is about identity. Lost identity and trying to find it in both the new world and the new one. The problem with immigrants is that they should realize that there is not a new or old world. There is only one global village out there. Anthony's stories were told to him in oral tradition and is the way of Portuguese romanticism. This longing for the past is true to their heart and is the thing that holds them back in Canada. Only recently have we started to see some connections to the Azores in the entertainment business. There are still more to discover. Barnacle Love's inception was inspired by the 1977 brutal murder of Emanuel Jaques and defined the Azorean character, but it also retreated them even more backwa