Geoff Nicholson was filled with dark, comic literary novels and eclectic non-fiction, character defined by cartography, Volkswagen beetles, urban walks, jokes, sexual fetishes, and obsessions. He was 71 years old.
His death in the hospital was due to chronic myelocytic leukemia, according to his partner Caroline Ganon. But it's a rare bone marrow cancer, as Nicholson sees as “not obviously uncommon,” it's a rare bone marrow cancer.
Nicholson is a character who often has an affair in a cartoonish, stylized Neurish dialogue, and because of his prolific output, he attracted devoted readers, if not large, if not large.
His Facebook profile included a list of “Liked” books, with the first two titles, “Gravity's Rainbow” and “The Big Sleep.”
Nicholson was a verbal joke, whether it was ambitious fiction or more mediocre writing. For the “Overview” page of his website, he annotated his own Wikipedia entries. Nicholson wrote “in favor,” in response to the claim that his work was “in favorable comparisons” with Kingsley and Martin Amis's works.
One of the people who compared him to mid-century British satirist Kingsley Amis was New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, who wrote a 1997 review of Nicholson's most famous novel, “Bleeding London.”
“Like he did in the past,” Kakutani wrote. Nicholson weaves the overlapping lives of his eccentric characters neatly into a quirky, black farce, a farce that combines the clever hijink of Alec Guinness Saling comedy with Kingsley Amy's satirical wit. ”
In “Bleeding London,” which was on the Whitbread Award nominee list, three main characters are obsessed with mapping the city.
(The novel began to take hundreds of photographers in 2014 with 58,000 photographs of London Street for an exhibition at City Hall.)
The map was a recurring theme for Mr. Nicholson. In his novel The City Under the Skin (2014), a type of mapography thriller, the woman is accused of, tattooed with a rough back map, and then released into an unknown dystopian city. One character is a store clerk at a map store.
Nicholson has accumulated maps for most of his life. He told the Los Angeles Times: And as a novelist, I always think, “Do you have a book on this?” ”
The protagonist of his novel “Hunters and Gatherers” (1994) is a bartender working on a book about a strange collector and its mountains.
“Collecting is an act of appropriation,” the character said, which could be Nicholson's vision statement. “The world is arbitrary and disconnected. By starting a collection, you start creating connections. You decide what is important and valuable. You create a neat world.”
In the times, Kakutani wrote, “Indeed, his own novel is a fascinating little testament to the impulse of art's orderly impulse.”
Nicholson's other obsessions included the VW bug. This was prominently distinctive in two novels, Life with Volkswagen (1996) and Volkswagen of Gravity (2009), and included sexual fetishes. He is the author of “Foot Soccer” (1995), a murder mystery and “Sex Collector” (2006), starring an unattended foot fetishist, and is a non-fiction work about porn lovers and accumulators.
In the Times Review, Emily Nussbaum wrote: “He's such a fascinating writer that you want him to succeed. Sadly, the territory Nicholson chose turns out to be surprisingly sexy.”
Nicholson married Diane Hanson, a former model who edited the fetishist magazine Legshow for a while. After living together in New York, the couple moved to Los Angeles when Hanson became editor of a sex-themed book at Taschen, a luxury art publisher. Nicholson enjoyed a kitche of the Hollywood Hills geodesic line at his 1960s kitsch.
Jeffrey Joseph Nicholson was born on March 4, 1953 in Sheffield, England, east of Manchester. He was Jeffrey and Violet Nicholson's only child. His father was a carpenter.
He studied English at Gonville & Caius University at Cambridge and Drama at Essex University.
He published early stories in the literary magazine Ambit, where prose editors are JG Ballard, author of dystopian science fiction novels. Nicholson succeeded Ballard and continued to publish works by Jonathan Lethem, Nick Sweeney and others.
In total, from 1987 to 2023, Nicholson published 17 novels and 10 non-fiction works. He may have mentioned his abundance, which was sometimes mentioned by reviewers.
“I published 20 books in 22 years (quite short). I don't think that's excessive given that I don't have a day's work,” he wrote in a 2009 Times essay about the fact that reviewers frequently mentioned his output. “But, whether accurate or not, “Prolific” definitely didn't feel like an alloy-free compliment. ”
Her early marriage to Tessa Robinson ended with divorce, just like her marriage to Hanson. Mr. Ganon is his only survivor. She is one of the photographers for the “Bleeding London” project, and Nicholson and she became a couple in 2018 when they returned to the village of Manningtree in Essex after their second divorce.
In his later years, Nicholson's obsessions simmered a bit, from fetishism to walking. He wrote a memoir traveler. “The Lost Art of Walking” (2008) was inspired by his habit of solving plot twists in novels on long walks. In “Walking in Ruins” (2013), the abandoned places he explores include the faded environment of Sheffield youth.
In his final book, Walking On Thin Air: A Life's Journey in 99 Steps (2023), Nicholson wrote: I walk around while I'm there, look around, and write about what I see and feel. That's not all I do in my life, but it's probably the best part. ”
The book was soaked in the knowledge that his life would likely be shortened by cancer, but of course he treated his situation more with gallows humor than with mental introspection.
“Nicholson's writing career was diverse, praiseworthy and courageous,” said Tom Zollner, who reviewed a memoir of a review of the Los Angeles book. “He stops to notice strange subjects that are not competing, avoiding the roads he often travels. He goes where he likes. He goes out frequently. No one can copy him.”
