Chronicle of an ordinary Apocalypse. The melancholic America of Nicolas Dickner or how to survive with trimmings of civilization

Nicolas Dickner's second novel, Tarmac (2009; translated in 2010 as Apocalypse for Beginners by Lazar Lederhendler) addresses the dislocation of family ties and the very contemporary fear of the destruction of humanity, opening up, within the landscape perspective, a horizon of insecurity that echoes the ecological challenges and global instability currently threatening the planet. Obsessed with the next Apocalypse, the adolescent narrator offers up an at once amused and troubled chronicle of the 21stcentury, adopting a melancholic posture which shapes the depiction of landscapes and settings. Far from the languid effusions of the pathos, these tales of collective, though primarily personal, catastrophes exhibit a quiet melancholy tinged with nonchalant irony, through which Dickner develops a poetics of playful and humorous elusion.