Peacefully employed on an uninhabited island, Teddy Bear, a translator of comic strips, lives in the company of his faithful dictionary, his marauding cat, Matousalem, and the Prince, his tennis ball machine. Convinced that the translator's happiness is in jeopardy, his boss helicopters in a few solitude-seeking companions: the lovely and elusive Marie, the aging nudist Featherhead with her extroverted Chihuahua in tow, Professor Moccasin, the somewhat deaf comic book scholar, the irritable Author, the Ordinary Man, and the Organizer, sent to "sensitize the population." The feverish pitch of the island's discordant chorus rises with the spring tides. Jacques Poulin's hilarious philosophical fable is an existential masterpiece.