Franz Nicolay

In 2009, musician Franz Nicolay left his job and over the next five years, he crossed the world with a guitar in one hand, a banjo in the other, and an accordion on his back, playing the anarcho-leftist squats and DIY spaces of the punk rock diaspora. While engaging with the works of literary predecessors from Rebecca West to Chekhov and the nineteenth-century French aristocrat the Marquis de Custine, Nicolay explores the past and future of punk rock culture in the post-Communist world.

Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar

The Humorless Ladies of Border Control

Patrick Book

Yes, Nicolay is a musician, but that fact is practically irrelevant. You don't need to be familiar with his music to pick up the narrative thread; he admits as much in that he only talks at length about the performances that take him across Russia, Ukraine, Mongolia, Siberia, and every place in between only once, and in a generic, summary fashion. 

This book reminds me a lot of David Byrne's "Bicycle Diaries," in which the author uses a common reference point as a gateway to take his readers into unfamiliar territory. And Nicolay takes us very far afield indeed, exploring some of the furthest reaches of a region that, for westerners, too easily falls into aged stereotypes and assumptions. 

His maturity as a writer is shocking, unless you have followed his musical career and are familiar with his keen insight into the contradictions and complications that make people so intriguing. His ability to project empathy, wit, and curiosity in his songs translates into long form; when combined with the scholarly nature of his research of these regions' history, the reader can learn so much about broad swaths of the background of these nations through snapshots and passing interactions with those who dwell inside their borders. 

If Nicolay is done with music, I will weep for the loss my ears will suffer. But should his gift for writing have shifted to the novel, I eagerly await any and all future projects. 

And to those who disagree, may their eyes fall out.

The Humorless Ladies of Border Control Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar

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