***Some light spoilers in this review!***It's tricky to review this one. My current girlfriend is friends with the author and translator, and the book has a fair bit of award power behind it, raising expectations considerably. So I was a bit disappointed when it turned out less wonderful than I had hoped.Not to say it isn't a good book. Nicolas has an excellent imagination, and his characters (my favourites being Joyce [the modern pirate girl], her grandfather, Maelo, Sarah [Noah's mother], and the mad-scientist trash archaeology professor), their origins, and details like weather descriptions and:"The air is suffused with the aroma of thousands of post offices scattered over the plains from Winnipeg to Calgary. Crushed paper, elastic bands, rubber stamps"...are fantastic. Dickner puts you in the mind of Noah and really hits on the incredibly uniform smell of Canada Post, stretching your mind to your own experiences buying stamps and Noah's mind as it wanders over the prairies, searching for his nomad mother. I really loved the inclusion of relevant bits of history, particularly pirate history, and it soon becomes apparent that Mr. Dickner is a very well-read and well-travelled individual. The three main characters: Joyce, Noah and the unnamed narrator/bookshop homebody fit into the book in a weaving, patchwork quilt of information, which is obviously linked to the 'three-headed-book/unicum' mentioned various times in "Nikolski." The characters are built with thick foundations which, despite the aforementioned weaving, cause you to care about them and long for more information on their fates. Sadly, after about 70% of the novel, this weaving started to lose me. The book seemed less and less inspired, and the previously tantalizing nature of the characters existing so close yet so far away became annoying and far too anti-climactic for my taste. The novel went from a page-turner with the odd so-so chapter to so-so chapters with some reasons to turn the page and I just could not except the 'tree-branch' style the author appeared to be going for. I wish the model had been more like 'tree to mistletoe' instead of 'tree with story branches only touching when the wind blows' and I wish the characters I spent hours getting to know didn't lamely wander around, toddle off, and die, so to speak....if the story had been about three separate characters leading separate lives and not, at least, linked in so many teasing ways, I wouldn't have minded the passive and realistic ending, but the author made too many connections, promised too much, and then made the connections even stronger artificially -- I mean what are the odds of those three characters being so close to each other in so many ways? Why not add an unrealistic but satisfactory ending if you're going to right an unrealistic linkage?? Frustrating.But -- 3 stars for a reason -- give it a read if you like unusual novel structures with interesting characters and descriptions from a Canadian author! This was neither mind-blowingly good, nor mind-numbingly bad; it just kind of was. There were parts that were hard to put down, and others that dragged, some things that were really creative and interesting and others that just didn't mesh very well. Even though you expect a certain amount of jumpiness in a book that contains several vignettes unfolding in parallel, it often felt pointlessly disjointed and left me feeling like I didn't know what the purpose or direction of the book was, a feeling that stuck with me (although I DID enjoy it) even after I finished it.
What do You think about Nikolski (2009)?
Love the interwoven stories / paths / destinies; very enjoyable.
—caramlefloat
