Thanks for All the Fish

Posted 21 March, 2008 in Book Reviews |

Nikolski, by Nicolas Dickner (trans. by Lazer Lederhendler). Alfred A. Knopf, $29.95 cloth, 298 pp., ISBN: 978-0-676-97879-7.

Canada is a nation of regions. That’s axiomatic to the point of cliché, but literary critics often elide the extent to which Canada’s regionalism influences its literature. Despite living in Toronto, Wayne Johnston’s fiction is inextricably linked to his native Newfoundland, the same way that W.O. Mitchell will always be associated with the prairies and Rudy Wiebe with the west.

It would be reductive to presume that regionalism is the driving factor in Canadian writing, and a writer’s geographical point of origin, while in many cases laying the groundwork for the kind of writer that person will become, is not necessarily a determinant of the calibre or kind of work he or she will ultimately produce. There is one region in Canada, however, that has consistently boasted a steady stream of quality literary fiction for the last decade or so, even though much of that fiction goes unnoticed or unappreciated by the majority of English readers in the rest of the country. That one fertile region is Quebec. Since the turn of the millennium, la belle province has given us strong novels by Élise Turcotte, Christianne Frenette, Jacques Poulin, Gaétan Soucy, and last year’s Giller-nominated Daniel Poliquin, to name just a few of the Franco-Canadian novelists who have been translated into English (a distressingly small number of those actually writing in the province).

Among Anglos writing in Quebec, Rawi Hage is perhaps the best-known recent addition to a list that already includes Mordecai Richler and Leonard Cohen, to name just two of the authentic greats of CanLit.

So it should perhaps come as no surprise that thirty-two-year-old Montreal resident Nicolas Dickner’s first novel is a startling, structurally ambitious work that leaves most of its English-Canadian contemporaries in the dust. Maybe it’s something in the water.

The aqueous metaphor is only partly glib, since Nikolski is, if nothing else, a waterlogged novel. Images of the sea and of seafaring suffuse the book, including repeated allusions to the greatest seafaring novel of all time, Melville’s Moby-Dick. The 1851 novel is referenced directly in Dickner’s book, but long before it makes a literal appearance, the attentive reader will have noticed how Nikolski’s opening line — “My name is unimportant.” — sounds suspiciously like an ironic inversion of the iconic imprecation to “Call me Ishmael.” The attentive reader will also recognize that the town from which Joyce, one of the novel’s three main figures, hails is called Tête-à-la-Baleine, literally, “head of the whale.”

Joyce holds down a job filleting fish at the Poisonnerie Shanahan in Montreal, while she dreams of following in the footsteps of her aunt, who was a pirate. Meanwhile, Noah, an archaeology student, foregoes studying in the American History or Georgraphy and Anthropology sections of the university library, preferring “the tranquility of Section V (Naval Sciences, Travel Narratives and Sea Serpents).” It is here that he meets Arzina, a transplanted Venezuelan who disappears at night into what Noah describes as “the Bermuda Triangle.”

As the novel opens, the final member of the narrative trio, the unnamed first-person narrator, is cleaning up his mother’s house after her death. His mother once lived on Water Street in Vancouver, and when the garbage truck hauling off her worldly possessions disappears at the end of the first chapter, a moving van pulls up “[i]n its wake.”

The repeated water motifs are only one of the many strands uniting our three protagonists. Each shares a familial connection — Noah and the unnamed narrator are half-brothers, their father is Joyce’s uncle. Early in the novel, Joyce, the would-be pirate, wonders if she would “have to escape to Vladivostok in order to elude the clutches of her family tree”; prior to this Noah’s mother speculates that his father “had shipped out in the direction of Vladivostok or had flown off to Fairbanks.” Noah is interested in the archaeology of trash, and Joyce becomes a bin diver, looking for discarded computer parts that have been disposed of throughout Montreal. While evading security guards and policemen, she discovers “piles of broken-down computers, display screens smudged with fingerprints, keyboards with missing teeth, modems, printers, hard disks, floppies, fragments of printed circuits,” all of it “so obsolete, so covered in grime, that Joyce often feels she has stepped into the shoes of an archaeologist.”

The internecine connections between and among the book’s three central characters provide Dickner with the mechanism for a structurally coherent story in which the structure never feels imposed from without. Everything in this novel appears organic; the disparate parts, far from being random or scattered, all tend toward a central purpose. This is a rare example of a novel in which the whole really is greater than the sum of its parts in isolation.

Dickner doesn’t really need to include the repeated leitmotif of a coverless book that passes from one character’s hands to another, or the narrator’s “Nikolski compass,” which points at the Mickey Spillane section of the bookstore in which he works, beyond which lies the tiny Aleutian island of Nikolski, where his and Noah’s father may — or may not — have decamped. Still, these elements provide additional layers of connectivity in a story that otherwise might be in danger of appearing overly diffuse or obscure.

Nikolski is a mass of contradictions: it is virtually plotless, yet never seems wayward or boring; it is an urban novel set in the recent past (in the decade between 1989 and 1999), yet it is redolent of history and anthropology; it is a novel in translation that nevertheless depends on the buoyancy of linguistic play for its effects (and, to this end, much credit should go to Lazer Lederhendler for a seamless translation). Above all, Nicolas Dickner is an author who is robustly unafraid to take risks, and for the most part the risks pay off.

His is a story of life in all its manifest contradictions, absurdities, and coincidences. Its ease of readability belies its weighty thematic heft, and its humour is grafted onto a deeply philosophical meditation about the nature of existence, the meaning of place, and the definition of home. The result is an intriguing, beguiling novel that may just be the CanLit find of the year.

2 comments to “Thanks for All the Fish”

panic, March 23rd, 2008 at 11:42 am:

• High praise indeed. Between you and The Pickle-y One, I’m convinced!

Kerry, March 24th, 2008 at 10:57 pm:

• Great review, and I’m so pleased you enjoyed it.

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