Fiction Chronicle.

BARNACLE LOVE By Anthony De Sa. Algonquin, paper, $13.95. De Sa's linked stories offer a double bildungsroman. In 1954, at the age of 20, Manuel Rebelo abandons his boring job at an Azores bank in favor of the risky life of a cod fisherman and a grandiose dream of escape. Rescued from the sea off the coast of Newfoundland by a fur trapper, Manuel becomes involved with the man's daughter, is betrayed by her and then abandons her. Years later, he and the new family he has started in Toronto pay a return visit to the Azores, drawn back for the funeral of his domineering mother. Manuel seems to have freed himself from his past, but in the remainder of these stories his son, Antonio, tells how his father failed in various businesses in Canada and fell into alcoholism -- and how Antonio, his sister and their mother stuck like barnacles to a Manuel who came to resemble his hateful mother. Although the book invites psychological analysis, its originality is anthropological, presented in descriptions of a Portuguese fishing community whose commonplace customs are retained even in a North American city. Yet De Sa has no nostalgia for that fishing village; it was there, after all, that Manuel's mother felt entitled to put glass in her son's marriage bed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]