Second life

>> Nikolski, Nicolas Dickner’s award-winning
novel about Montreal and Montrealers,
is released in English

by Juliet Waters

The look on Nicolas Dickner’s face when I point out that his nameless narrator doesn’t actually have a gender is something in between horror and amazement. Dickner’s first novel has just been released in translation. A multiple prize-winner in Quebec, Nikolski was also a French-language nominee for the Governor General’s Award in 2005.

Selected as one of Knopf’s “New Faces of Fiction 2008,” Nikolski is about to start a new life in English, and benefit from the promotional machine of a major Canadian publisher, But, sure enough, an early review has misidentified a male narrator as female.

Technically, it’s not really a misidentification. The narrator works in a used bookstore, and events and details from the narrator’s life take up less than 50 pages of the book.

“In French, of course, there’s no ambiguity because you can see how the adjectives are accordées,” Dickner explains. “That’s fascinating,” he continues and ponders the possibility that this character could also be read as a woman, then soon dismisses it. Suddenly he remembers a childhood toy the narrator rediscovers in the first few pages: an apple-green garbage truck.

It’s a good thing this is resolved. Genderless narrators have not worked well in the past for Knopf New Faces. Yann Martel, a New Face from 1996, tried it in Self, to mixed and tepid reviews. (This, and the September 11, 2001 release date, explains why Life of Pi was virtually ignored in Canada until it won the Booker/Mann award a year later.)

But it’s interesting that almost 10 years later—had it not been for the garbage truck—a novelist could do almost the same thing without intending to.

This is the world of Nikolski, a world where characters are defined less by gender, and few possessions, as they are by the catalogue of their desires and obsessions.

For the narrator, the defining obsession is the books in the second-hand bookstore he works at, S.W. Gam (a shout-out to S.W. Welch, which Dickner calls “my favourite spot in Montreal.”)

“This is a book that talks a lot about books,” says Dickner, who himself used to work in a second-hand bookstore. A constant stream of books, from the Esperanto translation of Dharma Bums, to A History of Whaling, comment on the nomadic, often isolated lives of the three central characters. Through most of the book, these characters don’t meet, but they share one important thing, the DNA of a seafaring drifter, one Jonas Doucet.

Doucet is the narrator’s long-lost father. A miniature mariner’s compass that he sent as a final birthday present hangs around the narrator’s neck, an almost mocking reminder of how rooted his small life is. Doucet is also the father of Noah, who has led a more peripatetic life with his mother, a Chipewyan Indian who has lost her status. And finally, Doucet is the uncle of Joyce, who leaves a large family of male relatives in Tête-à-la-Baleine to relocate to Montreal and pursue a career in computer piracy.

All three characters live isolated, but weirdly interesting lives in Little Italy. Noah has become an archaeology student with an interest in the academic possibilities of garbage. Joyce works at a fish store in the Jean-Talon Market, while she refurbishes old computers. And the narrator keeps the tale gently spinning until the point where their lives gradually converge.

Though the title of the novel refers to a tiny Aleutian village towards which the broken needle of the narrator’s compass endlessly points, this is very much a book about Montrealers.

“In Nikolski, the setting is capital. It’s not just the scenery. It’s not just the wallpaper. It’s really important because it’s basically the setting that is shaping the characters. When you look at Montreal, which is a complex place from all points of view, of course that’s going to create a complex story, and complex characters.”

And, inevitably, complex, and sometimes just plain wrong, interpretations.

Nikolski by Nicolas Dickner;
translated by Lazer
Lederhendler, Knopf,
hc, 290PP, $29.95