Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner, Book Review
New Award-Winning Canadian Fiction
Nicolas Dickner was born in Rivière-du-Loup in 1972 and grew up in Quebec. After studying visual arts and literature, he travelled in Europe and Latin America before settling in Montreal. Dickner won two literary awards for his 2002 short story collection L'encylopedie du petit cercle, including the Prix Adrienne-Choquette for the best collection of short fiction of the year. Nikolski won the Prix Anne-Hebert award for Best first Book.
Nikolski Is a Novel About Growing up and Finding Your Way in the World
Nothing in this poetic novel is ordinary or common. The protagonist awakes to the rumbling sounds of the surf hitting the shores of the Aleutian islands, until he realizes that it is the diesel engine of a garbage truck. Geography, marine biology, stories of pirates, Moby Dick, and the archeology of garbage are themes that connect the lives of Joyce, Noah and a third unnamed character. The three don't know each other, but their paths cross, and only the lucky reader learns that they share more than a desperate desire to know who they are — a difficult task if the only tangible proof of your father's existence is a toy compass — and how to make an impact in the world.
Nikolski is a Story of Absent Parents
The story confirms how absent parents are still connected with the lives of their children. It is a coming of age story, as a young man who doesn't know his father, discovers that he is good at parenting. A bookstore clerk , who settled behind shelves of antique books after his mother died, finally decides to venture out into the world and a young woman who never knew her mother, flies to a Caribbean island in search of long lost ancestors.
The Setting is Capital as it Forms the Characters
Readers will go to Google Earth to find Nikolski, a tiny village on Umnak Island at the Southwestern tip of the Aleutians. The setting further includes a remote island near Venezuela and Tête-à-la-Baleine, a small French-speaking community on the Lower North Shore of the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Quebec. Nicolas Dickner wrote most of the novel as a writer in residence in Bamberg, Germany. He says, he brought many Canadian maps, spread them out in his study, and marked the locations of his characters' whereabouts. This gave structure to the story.
Contemporary Canadian Fiction in Translation
Nikolski, was originally published in Quebec by Éditions Alto in 2005, and then in 2007 by Éditions Denoël in France. The English edition, with an excellent translation by Lazer Lederhendler, was published as part of Knopf Canada’s New Face of Fiction program in 2008. Nikolski is an impressive debut novel, a story that begs to be reread, as only the top layer of linguistic and semantic connections jumps of the page the first time around. It is a whimsical story within a story and full of surprises.
Nicolas Dickner discusses his novel Nikolski on YouTube
Dickner, Nicolas, Nikolski, Boston:Trumpeter, 2009. Print.
Nikolski, Novel by Nicolas Dickner
|
Nicolas Dickner
|
What do you think about this article?
More in Reading & Literature
Latest Articles