In this highly ambitious debut novel, Quebecois playwright Larry Tremblay creates a world of surrealist marvel and grotesquerie where nothing is quite what it seems. The book’s narrator, a photographer named Christophe Langelier, is much like the characters of Tremblay’s solo stage plays: on a quest to purge himself of trauma and obsession so that he may realize his true identity.

Christophe tells us he is a man “destroyed by love.” His passion for his girlfriend Anna has never been reciprocated, and now, after 10 years together, she has dropped him without ceremony. This is the same woman who, in the early days of their relationship, refused to have sex unless Christophe could literally eat his bicycle. But Anna’s cruel games do nothing to weaken Christophe’s infatuation. He has built a shrine of Anna pictures and written an “Annalexicon,” which appears as a glossary at the end of the novel. (“Anna-Parachute” is “another way of saying love gives one wings” while “Anna-Skin” is a “backdrop used for love stories with unhappy endings.”)

In other words, Christophe has got it bad. As the novel opens, he laments: “I had become the man who spoke the name of Anna.” Clearly, it is time for Christophe’s quest to begin. As is to be expected, it is a quest riddled with strange encounters, symbolic trials, and extraordinary transformations. The Bicycle Eater is at times beguiling, but Tremblay’s mixing of highly charged lyricism, parodic burlesque, dreamlike hyperbole, and half-hearted realism can also be maddening. The prose is as manic and self-consciously theatrical as the book’s narrator.

Christophe swings from ecstatic joy to apocalyptic anguish with such regularity that we soon grow as indifferent to his feelings as the cruel Anna. Sheila Fischman relays Tremblay’s linguistic play skillfully, but she is forced into awkward bricolage when his extended metaphors, often lacking coherence, get him into trouble. Christophe tells us, “The appearance of [Anna’s] blond hair, which exploded and was about to run aground on the edge of her naked breasts, nailed me to the rug.” Such poorly wrought sentences are symptomatic of the novel’s general confusion.

In the end, The Bicycle Eater falls short of achieving its intended effects. As readers, we are left on the outside looking in, startled by what we see rather than implicated.