Bookshop Blog

Nicolas Dickner, Nikolski

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On occasion, booksellers are pleasantly surprised by the recommendations that we receive from a customer tip-off. At The Edinburgh Bookshop, we devote a lot of time to tweaking the range of books we stock. Did you know, for instance, that there are more books available and in-print in the UK than in the USA? We spend a lot of time talking to publishers, other booksellers, agents and authors, to ensure that the eclectic range we stock is also the best we could possibly stock at that time. In short, it is a labour of love that necessarily includes the feedback we get from every customer who visits us.

A customer recommended Nicolas Dickner’s debut novel on the basis that it was ‘the best book since Richard Flanagan’s novel, Gould’s Book of Fish’. High praise.

Nicolas Dickner has won a raft of awards for the French-language edition (he’s from Quebec) of his book but remains unknown to the majority of English readers. The publisher’s own description of this fantastic novel states that: “Intricately plotted and shimmering with originality, Nikolski charts the curious and unexpected courses of personal migration, and shows how they just might eventually lead us to home…” but that doesn’t do justice to a book which offers a breathtaking and original perception of the world, written in a language and style that is both emotionally affecting and sophisticated. A treasure hunt of great inventiveness and passion, this humorous and poignant novel offers an exploration of the idea of connection.

Nikolski is a novel with a distinctive voice. In the author’s unwillingness to tidy up all loose ends, we are left with lasting imagery that creates a story comparable to the best novels of Michael Chabon, Thomas Pynchon, Georges Perec or David Mitchell.

Born thousands of miles apart, three people grow up feeling curiously at sea. In the spring of 1989 each cut themselves adrift from their birthplaces and set out to discover what or who might anchor them in their lives. They leave almost everything behind, carrying with them only a few artefacts of their lives so far possessions that have proven so formative that they can’t imagine surviving without them and the accumulated memories of their own lives and family histories.

Noah, who was taught to read using road maps during a life of nomadic travels with his mother their home being a 1966 Bonneville station wagon with a silver trailer decides to leave the prairies for university in Montreal. But putting down roots there turns out to be a more transitory experience than he expected. Joyce, stifled by life in a remote village on Quebec’s Lower North Shore, and her overbearing relatives, hitches a ride into Montreal, spurred on by a news story about a modern-day cyber-pirate and the spirit of her own buccaneer ancestors. While her daily existence remains surprisingly routine working at a fish shop in Jean-Talon market, dumpster-diving at night for necessities it’s her Internet piracy career that takes off. And then there’s the unnamed narrator, who we first meet clearing out his deceased mother’s house on Montreal’s South Shore, and who decides to move into the city to start a new life. There he finds his true home among books, content to spend his days working in a used bookstore and journeying though the many worlds books open up for him.

Over the course of the next ten years, Noah, Joyce and the unnamed bookseller will sometimes cross paths, and sometimes narrowly miss each other, as they all pass through one vibrant neighbourhood on Montreal’s Plateau. Their journeys seem remarkably unformed, more often guided by the prevailing winds than personal will, yet their stories weave in and out of other wondrous tales stories about such things as fearsome female pirates, urban archaeologists, unexpected floods, fish of all kinds, a mysterious book without a cover and a dysfunctional compass whose needle obstinately points to the remote Aleutian village of Nikolski. And it is in the magical accumulation of those details around the edges of their lives that we begin to know these individuals as part of a greater whole, and ultimately realize that anchors aren’t at all permanent, really; rather, they’re made to be hoisted up and held in reserve until their strength is needed again.

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You can watch an interview with Nicolas talking about Nikolski here on YouTube.

From deep down in the interweb, I found a review from The Guardian online by author Patrick Ness for those who are interested in reading more.

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Different passages will stand out for each reader but a personal favourite includes this description of the peculiar world of the bookshop: “The work is not as simple as it may appear; the S. W. Gam Bookshop is one of those places in the universe where humans long ago relinquished any control over matter… it takes more than good pair of eyes and a few ounces of memory to work here. It’s crucial to develop a particular perception of time. The thing is – what’s the best way of putting this? – that different avatars of our bookshop coexist simultaneously in a multitude of discrete times, separated by very thin ellipses.”