[Book] Spring Tides

Spring Times, which has been translated from the Québécoi novel Les grandes marées and apparently has won the Governor-Generalès Award for Fiction, was a pleasant surprise. The book opens with a man, code named Teddy Bear, living on an island retreat in the St. Lawrence River all by himself and his cat, Matousalem. He works as a translator of comic strips and gets a visit from his boss every week. As the book progresses, the boss starts bringing people to the island, and the presence of the increasing number of islanders starts to have subtle and gradual effects on our solitary hero. Touted as a "thought-provoking fable of man and society," this book at first seemed like a funny and quirky easy read to me. I liked the weird characters on the island as well as their quirky dialogue and strange interactions. However, it soon became clear to me that the book was full of symbols and underlying meanings that frankly I didn't quite get. It's the kind of book that reminds me of Nightwood and The Sound and Fury, although the writing is pretty simple and straightforward compared to those books. I sort of wish I'm taking a class on this because it'd be fun to study the book in depth and talk about all the symbolism, but since I had no lecture or cliff notes, I was left a bit confused about what the author is really trying to say. Is the book about happiness, meaning of life and work or loneliness of man? The trouble with fables is that it is sometimes hard to see the parallel between the fable and reality, and this book gets a bit too abstract for me in the end. I did enjoy it quite a lot still and would probably re-read it sometime. It is a "thought-provoking" (and head-scratching) book all right.

7/10