Name: Patrick Book's review of Someone Should Pay for Your Pain by Franz Nicolay
Item: Someone Should Pay for Your Pain
Rating: 5
Author: Patrick Book

Franz Nicolay

Someone Should Pay for Your Pain by Franz Nicolay is about a singer-songwriter named Rudy Pauver, his conflicted relationship with a successful former protege, and a young niece who wants to travel with him and whose surprise appearance forces a reckoning with himself and his past. This illuminating anti-hero story propels the characters through time, story, and philosophical discourse with sharp asides, short stories, dialogues, and monologues. A musician's book for the punk scene insider, with so many truths that "punks" (whatever) have had to reconcile or deny, that it's like holding up a mirror and seeing something beautiful and ugly. Engrossing and compelling, the novel wrestles with the "punk ethos" and features a punk/rock-inflected inside look at life on the road: magical, honest, and pure, but also destructive, dangerous, and out of control. The author, a writer and musician best known for playing the accordion and piano in The World/Inferno Friendship Society and keyboards in The Hold Steady, was once named #1 of the top ten accordionists in punk rock. He is also the author of the travel book The Humorless Ladies of Border Control: Touring the Punk Underground from Belgrade to Ulaanbaatar (a New York Times "Season's Best Travel Books" pick) and is a lecturer in writing about music at UC Berkeley.

Someone Should Pay for Your Pain

Dave Konopka

Patrick Book

This is a delightfully authentic work that offers a remarkably-authentic view of “the scene” and what comes after. Nicolay has the heart of a punk, the soul of a poet, and an anthropologist’s eye for detail. Every page rings with lived experience, from life in a bunk on a touring bus to the ignobility of performing for a dozen people in a two hundred cap room. 

It’s easy to guess with whom he most identifies, given his biography and lyrics and song titles from this book appearing on his most recent album. Hopefully Nicolay doesn’t share Rudy’s dwindling enthusiasm for creating and performing music, but if he does, this hopefully represents a second act that keeps his pen lively. 

Check out his non-fiction too: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/2.... Guy is a genius.

Dave Konopka &
Someone Should Pay for Your Pain by Franz Nicolay

Reviews

Join the club

Dave Konopka &Someone Should Pay for Your Pain by Franz Nicolay

Reviews

Join the club

Dave Konopka &
Someone Should Pay for Your Pain by Franz Nicolay