Nikolski
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4.8 • 5 Ratings
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
Winner of CBC Canada Reads 2010
Winner of the Governor General's Literary Award for Translation
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.
Spring 1989. Three young people leave their far-flung birthplaces to follow their personal songs of migration. Each ends up in Montreal, each on a voyage of self-discovery, dealing with the mishaps of hearbreak and the twisted brances of their shared family tree.
With humour, charm and the sure touch of a born storyteller, Nicolas Dickner crafts a tale that shows the surprising links between garbage-obsessed archaeologists, pirates past and present, earthquake victims, sea snakes, several very large tuna fish, an illiterate deep-sea diver, a Commodore 64, a mysterious book with no cover and a broken compass whose needle obstinately points to the Aleutian village of Nikolski.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Dickner's first novel is an odd tale of missed connections, restlessness and the search for home that follows three quirky Montrealites. One story line follows a nameless narrator who works in a second-hand Montreal bookshop and reveres an inexpensive compass sent to him when he was a child by his absent father. Meanwhile, Noah, who grew up in the care of a transient single mother, arrives in Montreal to study archeology and rents a room from the owner of a fish shop. Then there's Joyce, a young woman from a family that claims pirate origins, who washes up in Montreal, finds work in the fish shop and begins her own version of living the family legend. The characters' lives brush up against one another (largely thanks to a book about pirates that, through various personal connections, ends up as the lightly binding force of the three characters' fates) but in a nice subversion of the "intersecting fates" arc don't loudly collide. Dickner's three spiritual nomads are strangely fascinating, while Lederhendler's smooth translation makes this offbeat novel all the more attractive.
