The Bicycle Eater

Allison Sivak is a librarian in the Science and Technology Library,
University of Alberta.

The Bicycle Eater is a surrealistic romp through Quebec and Mexico,
following the travail of Christophe Langelier, the book’s narrator, in
his obsessive love for Anna, a woman who continuously evades him.
Characters change identities and genders as easily as clothes, and
Christophe is a bewildered witness to it all. The author’s background
as playwright is clearly evident in his narrative style, in which the
characters present extended monologues, telling their own stories with
an operatic level of drama.

The novel is fast-paced, shifting from scene to scene, character to
character, and locale to locale, allowing little time to pause and
consider the fantasticness of it all. Tremblay employs much comic
relief, both slapstick humour and dry wit, such as the letter Christophe
receives from the Canada Council for the Arts, suggesting that he employ
the services of a health-care professional, but that they are pleased to
grant him an extension to complete his project so that he can more fully
investigate his “artistic interrogation.” The work also touches on
the political, pulling in threads of the history of Vietnamese
immigrants to Quebec in the 1970s, the AIDS crisis, and identity
politics. The Bicycle Eater is ultimately an artistic interrogation in
itself, a rollicking carnival of a novel that surprises and engages at
every turn.