Nicolas Dickner's Nikolski is the reason "Canada Reads" is awesome. I shouldn't think I'd ever have occasion to read this book otherwise, and I really liked it. It was a charming, light and funny read and absolutely unlike anything I've read since Fruit last year. That it won a GG for translation probably means it captures most of that which is usually lost in translation, so I do feel comfortable saying Dickner maybe swung for the fences a little bit more than he needed to, but the result still feels like a comfy small town story that spans the country and the Americas.
The picture he paints of Montreal is really cool. I'm so soaked with Toronto-centric media that having a go at the multicultural hodge podge of big cities through a different lens is refreshing to the point of giddiness. The characters are troubled without being tragic, and the overall arc of the whole shebang is happy. It's a quick read and it makes you smile. I should be frequenting that city a lot more than I do.
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