The View From Here, June 2011 - see full review below
Quotes
"Nick Sweeney is a special writer; erudite and cosmopolitan, simultaneously clever yet warm, droll yet melancholy. Laikonik Express has a range of references and obsessions that are much broader and more intriguing than those found in most contemporary novels. It is a meditative comedy, and also a great read."
Geoff Nicholson
"Nick Sweeney's Laikonik Express is one of those rare things: a debut novel that is both original and immediately recognisable as a work of true voice."
Lee Rourke
Geoff Nicholson
"Nick Sweeney's Laikonik Express is one of those rare things: a debut novel that is both original and immediately recognisable as a work of true voice."
Lee Rourke
Reviews
February 2013 in Our Book Reviews Online by Maryom
Laikonik Express is a road-trip novel with a difference - it's by train! Like all road-trippers, long-time friends Kennedy and Don are chasing their dreams: Kennedy wants to be the man to discover that next great thing in American literature; Don just wants to meet up again with a woman he thinks he's fallen in love with. What they discover is that their goal might not be somewhere else or at some distance point in the future but here and now - and not in quite the form they'd expected.
It took me a while to get into reading this novel. In part this could have been due to getting used to e-reading on the new Kindle or that I feared, with Kennedy harping on about his discovery of new great American novelist and constant literary references, that it was trying too hard. It didn't really grab me till the start of the 'second leg' of the journey - up to the snowy wastes of Abel via, seemingly, most of the bars in Poland! Abel itself is wonderfully imagined - an out-of season seaside resort trapped under snow and ice - and it's here that they meet not the woman they'd been looking for but Krystyna, former war-time guerrilla fighter, former car development engineer in the US now returned home and dying but still beautiful and full of life.
It's a book that, having read it, discovered the overall pattern and seen how it ends, I'd go back and re-read, expecting it to grow on me.
See the full review here.
February 2013 in Necessary Fiction, from a review of Unthank Books' output by Writer in Residence David Rose
The first novel from Unthank I read was Laikonik Express by Nick Sweeney. (Sweeney is also a musician; typically for a writer, he plays guitar — in a brass band: the Trans-Siberian March Band. Check them out; they’re great fun.)
Laikonik Express is a ‘buddy novel’, an ‘On The Road’ for our day. One of the differences between Britain and America: America has On The Road, we have On The Buses, a television sitcom so dire it now has cult status. Shrewdly, Sweeney sets his novel in Poland and Istanbul. He also makes the ‘buddies’ Americans, both writers, friends in Istanbul, one of whom returns to his family’s native land leaving behind a novel ms. found by the other, Kennedy, who follows him to convince him to publish it. This involves a rail trip on the eponymous Express from Warsaw to a summer resort (in winter) on the Baltic, and some life-affirming, at least life-enhancing encounters. I loved it. And it has a brilliant ‘Kennedy’ joke (nothing to do with J.F.K. though).
David Rose is the author of the 'anti-novel' Vault.
September 2012 in Pamphlets of Destiny, by Lawrence Burton
Not entirely sure what to make of this debut, and my views faltered during reading, ranging from bored to amused to entirely engaged. The narrative follows writer Nolan Kennedy to Poland where he tries to coax Don Darius, his friend and also a writer, into completing an unpublished and apparently amazing novel he's been sitting on for far too long. I'd say Laikonik Express is Kerouac'sOn the Road except for the fact that it's set on a Polish train, and never having read On the Road there's a danger I might actually be talking out of my arse.
Much of what transpires is low on incident, largely conversational and anecdotal, inspiring the thought that this may represent characters as much in search of a story as their author; and whilst much of the Polish detail is fascinating, I was never quite convinced that Kennedy or Darius were ever entirely engaged with their surroundings, but for all I know this may well have been the point. Clearly it is a novel which to some extent concerns itself with the process of writing a novel, possibly an examination of the relationship between the terrain and that which ends up on the printed page. When, towards the end of the book, the lads meet Krystyna and learn that she is dying of cancer it seems the harsh reality of the situation obliges them to at last engage on a level beyond that of scenes viewed from the window of a railway carriage.
Possibly.
I suspect there may be a great deal that I missed in Laikonik Express, and certainly it seems pregnant with the possibilities of what it might be saying, if it really is saying any one specific thing. If the point is the journey rather than the destination, I may have appreciated more focus on the journey itself, with a little less on the anecdotes of our travellers which tended to unbalance the narrative a little in my view. Yet in the final quarter it all seemingly adds up by means suggestive of a purpose to the rambling of previous chapters.
At this point I should perhaps stress that I did enjoy Laikonik Express even if I wasn't always sure of where it was going or why. Those online reviews I've checked out mostly heap glowing praise on the quality of Nick Sweeney's narrative, and rightly so. The man is clearly incapable of a dull sentence, with even the most prosaic of observations sparkling with an effortless wit that puts most of Nick Sweeney's contemporaries to shame.
Possibly an unusual debut - says the man who rarely picks up anything that doesn't have a picture of a robot on the cover - but one that may prove more rewarding with time, and one that hints very strongly at better to come.
Lawrence Burton blogs at Pamphlets of Destiny, and is interested in certain kinds of sci-fi, Mexico and the occasional book without a robot on the cover.
July 2012 in Fiction Uncovered, by Paul Kavanagh
A line from Nick Sweeney’s new novel Laikonik Express reads:
Kennedy recalled the Baltic beach scene from Gunter Grass’s Tin Drum, shit-stirrer Oskar and his mom watching a longshoreman fish off a shore a lot like the one he looked on now.
“Shit-stirrer Oskar,” but when you are so small maybe that’s all you can amount to—the child Marcel in À la recherche du temps perdu is surely the biggest shitstirrer of them all. Anyway, this appellation, “Shit-stirrer Oskar,” a nod to Joyce, (not out of context, Joyce-flavor permeates Laikonik Express) caught my eye, twofold, yes, Oskar was a shitstirrer, that’s the truth, you can’t refute that, there’s one, here’s two: Nick Sweeney is the kind of writer I long for. With the slightest nod, he is able to conjure up magic. “Shit-stirrer Oskar” had me laughing aloud. I am silly I know. All writing is magic. I might have to go back to my books, but I am sure that the evil genius, Egyptian if I remember rightly, that invented writing also invented games, dice, checkers, and the magic trick. I enjoy these little nods. It sets the tone of the book. They are the softwood timber that makes up the rail track that allows the train to run smoothly.
Nick Sweeney tells it like it is, and he hits the nail on the head, two clichés, I know, but at the end of the night, three clichés, clichés are clichés because they are the truth. I know, the reader, me, that Nick Sweeney is as mendacious as they come, but as with Raymond Roussel, I am fooled into believing that the mendacity on the page, made manifest in ink, is the truth. Are Mermaids edible, was Thomas Pynchon really J D Salinger, did six-year-old Don witness the assassination of JFK, does he have proof that Lee Harvey Oswaldski really did it, how did Jack Kerouac die? You’ll have to read the book to find out.
Laikonik Express is a quest book. Nolan Kennedy, a young American teaching English in Istanbul and a Sancho Panza to an alcoholic Don Quixotic, a writer by the name of Don Darius, conjures up a quest to save his friend from the bottle, vodka, after reading “the mighty unpublished novel” left abandoned by his friend. If only somebody would have taken Flann O’Brien on such a journey, if only somebody would have published The Third Policeman while the great man was. For Kennedy, Darius is a paragon of the American writer, a Jack London of sorts. Paragon may be the wrong word, although many American writers, not only American writers, have worshipped at the feet of Jack London, the mythmaker. Hemingway, Mailer, Bukowski genuflected before London, so why not Don Darius. Kennedy believes his friend is, maybe, one of the greats. He believes it and that is all we need, and so, we have the quest, the end, the reward. The object of the quest is not the lost word, or the grail, but a woman. At other end of the Baudelairean experience, for Pound the ephemeral moment produced, In a Station of the Metro, there has to be a woman. The woman is a mystery woman, and will always be a mystery. As with Baudelaire and Pound, Sweeney’s woman is nothing more than an ignis fatuus.
Did you know that Jack London was one of the first Americans to surf? When he first encountered surfing, he believed the surfers were using dead bodies. When he found out they were using only boards made of coconut trees, he lost interest and decided to take up bartending.
Laikonik Express is your quintessential picaresque novel. Sweeney, bravely, doesn’t shy away from the ingredients; they are all there, you know them all, you read books, I know you do, if you didn’t you wouldn’t be reading this review, so you know what goes into the picaresque novel. It is a Rabelaisian adventure, a Satyricon with Neal and Sal. We get two Villons for the price of one, on the road, getting into trouble, although they are spared the strappado. It is a boozy, music-filled, peripatetic burping, retching, puking rodeo. Sweeney with cutthroat alacrity and skill cuts a path through a mirthful landscape, inhabited by a grotesque, carnival, circusy, pack of characters. The last time this landscape gave me the giggles was when I took a journey with Švejk. Sweeney is a comic writer; Laikonik Express is full of twists and turns that will leave you giggling and asking for a return ticket.
Oh, by the way: Nick Sweeney is a musician and lives in London. Laikonik Express is published by Unthank Books.
Paul Kavanagh is the author of The Killing of a Bank Manager (2011) and Iceberg (2012) published by Honest Publishing.
January 2012 in Curious Book Fans and dooyoo.co.uk, by Mary Bor
As a subject for a novel the road trip - or rail trip in the case of "Laikonik Express" - but in his full length debut Nick Sweeney has injected new life into the genre. I've tended to avoid road trip writing of late: somehow the trips are never nearly as interesting or exciting as my own. In "Laikonik Express", though, I found a setting almost tailor-made for my own travel predilections, characters that I found both credible and engaging and more than its fair share of wry humour.
The story is simple yet as multi-layered as you want it to be. Nolan Kennedy, a young American teacher of English living and working in Istanbul has to find his friend (and alcoholic) Don Darius, a writer of sorts. Nolan has found a manuscript in the bin, an unfinished novel penned by his friend. Nolan is struck by its greatness and, determined to see it published; he sets out to persuade Don Darius to do something about it. The trouble is that Don Darius has gone off in search of a woman he met on a train journey through Eastern Europe on the Laikonik Express; unless he does, he won't be able to write. Nolan has to find him.
You can use all the clichés in the book to describe "Laikonik Express" - road (or rail trip), coming of age novel (though admittedly the protagonists aren't exactly gap year travellers), a story of friendship, of discovery...and it is all of those but "Laikonik Express" has such an original voice that it transcends all those descriptions and comes into a class of its own. The style of narration is slick and cool; there's almost a beat voice going on and there's plenty of insight without too much introspection. There are shades of Hunter S. Thompson, of Kerouac and even Salinger but Sweeney does have a clear, distinct voice. Don't believe the hype: descriptions of "Laikonik Express" as a "Sideways with vodka" don't do Sweeney's book justice.
This is a road-trip for the slacker generation: if you must compare it against a film, it's what "Before Sunrise" would have been like had Jesse and Delphine been as cool as they thought they were. But, more than that, this is the real Eastern Europe and Sweeney totally captures the settings. This is every train trip I've been on in the Balkans, and every grimy down at heel post communist town I've visited. I love that Sweeney writes about the "real" places, this isn't a travelogue and he's no literary tour guide. It's obvious that Sweeney knows this part of the world, so brilliantly does he capture the essence of these places, but he happily avoids presenting a thinly disguised version of his own experiences.
I loved the relationship between Don Darius and Nolan; I loved the way their committed attitude to finding Don Darius's mystery woman negates the fact that probably both are using the trip to avoid doing anything more useful or important. It's interesting that Nolan makes the trip for Don Darius: I didn't get a feeling that there was much solidity in their friendship which makes all the more interesting that he goes to such lengths for the writer. I'm not sure that the nature of their friendship was explored as fully as it could have been. With other characters, too, I felt that the development was slightly lacking but it didn't spoil my enjoyment.
The narration is peppered with cultural references which work for the most part but were occasionally lost on me. Perhaps because I found I identified so much with the author, the characters and the settings I was prepared to go along with this in spite of it becoming a little tedious and show-offish in places.
Atmospheric, hugely funny and poignant where it needs to be "Laikonik Express" - even the name makes me smile - is a remarkable debut. This is a book I will read again and again.
See the Curious Books Fans site here.
February 2012 in Necessary Fiction, by Susan Jupp
Nick Sweeney’s novel Laikonik Express is named after a long-distance train that runs between Krakow and Gdynia in Poland but we do not meet this “central character” until the narrator, Nolan Kennedy, has already travelled from Istanbul, where he lives, to Warsaw.
Kennedy has found an abandoned typescript by his friend Don Darius when the latter left his flat to move to Warsaw. Convinced that this is a major literary work, Kennedy is on his way to see Don, as the novel opens, to persuade him of the novel’s worth. Don has another priority, however: to trace a woman he met on a train.
The title provides the name of the train but also – more importantly – the experience of travelling with its views, glimpses and snippets of other lives, its chance encounters and overheard conversations, risks and opportunities. For that is what this book is about: Kennedy and Darius are travellers, observers, story-tellers, “people overseas”, who recount what they see and hear but do not necessarily go below the surface to understand more.
Laikonik Express is set in Poland in 1992. Nick Sweeney, who lived there from 1992 to 1996, says he wrote it hoping to capture the atmosphere of both changing times and the special climate of “silence in the snow” of winter.
The cold and snow are ever-present, since the characters have to struggle through them and the reader certainly feels the cold and damp. There are walks: around Warsaw, in Gdynia and Abel (a resort on the Baltic Sea) but much of the action takes place indoors: in bars especially (for warmth as well as refreshment), in flats, at stations and on trains, even in cars.
We get to know the main characters very well indeed. Kennedy, the narrator, is American, a teacher of English as a foreign language (EFL) in Istanbul. Don Darius is also an American EFL teacher, now in Warsaw, previously in Istanbul and before that in Saudi Arabia. Don describes them both as “lonesome world-weary loafers … overseas and out of place”. Jacek is a Polish teacher of English and PhD student of linguistics who rescues Kennedy and Don when they arrive in Abel. Krystyna is Jack’s mother, a former scientist who once worked in the USA, now seriously ill with cancer. Ola, the object of Don’s search, we only see briefly but do not meet; she remains pale. Ling (Kennedy’s Chinese girlfriend) and Kennedy’s dead father (a “beat”) we get to know well, through Kennedy’s reflections during the downtime of travel.
Other characters, often barely seen or heard, are vivid, and described in a style that represents the novel as a whole – humorous, good-tempered.
Kennedy has ostensibly left Istanbul to find Don after discovering his typescript: “Then it kind of turned into one of those mysteries that gets you out of your armchair and onto trains, investigating.”
Is this an expression of friendship, one of the novel’s themes? On the surface perhaps, but Kennedy realises that he has other motivations. This was also a trial separation from Ling, whom her father would soon send back to China – separating them forever.
Words and writing and symbols often feature in the text, whether in the Chinese characters Kennedy practices or, strikingly, as a path in the snow: “Kennedy’s thoughts careered in and out, fonts changing, going big and small and plain and fancy, and he let them write themselves onto the snow so that he could follow the trail of them back to the hotel.”
The conversations, particularly between Kennedy and Darius, sound authentic: colloquial, sometimes foul-mouthed, with nicknames, plays on words, shared references to literature, films, music; their banter (often drink or drug induced) carries the “story” along with little effort on the reader’s part – except not to miss (easily done) the occasional pearl. Kennedy’s reflections are stream of consciousness, frequently very funny and occasionally poetic.
On the surface, much is flippant and light-hearted in Laikonik Express, nothing violent or nasty – except for Krystyna’s illness. Some scenes are pure slapstick, such as the encounter with a ticket inspector. Many jokes revolve around misunderstandings of English. For example, a scene with a fellow passenger who announces – to two teachers of English as a foreign language – that he has not understand a word of their English!
So what is it all about? Kennedy has come full circle still “lost in words” but the action of travel (as opposed to writing) has had a positive effect on his love for Ling. The difficult question of being “people overseas” has been temporarily resolved. Don has achieved the success of which Kennedy was the harbinger. Kennedy has written the story behind the story, as Krystyna made him promise to do …
It is a brave narration that includes so much detail, filling the novel of 296 pages. There is a risk that a reader could take exception to the tone (too brash, too clever?) and look for more structure, more depth in the topics raised (the new Poland, for example). However, Laikonik Express is an example of the journey being more important than the destination, the travelling of more value than the getting there – even with a happy ending.
See the full review here.
February 2012, customer review on Amazon by David Rose
I loved this book; a novel of friendship, love and loss, history and loss, literature and loss...
An American, known throughout by his surname - Kennedy - living and teaching in Istanbul, takes the eponymous train across Europe to Poland, in search of fellow American, his buddy Don; in search too, of clarification as to the novel manuscript Don has abandoned in Istanbul. Can Kennedy persuade Don it's the masterpiece Kennedy believes it to be?
No sooner settling to sleep in Don's Warsaw apartment, Kennedy is dragged back onto the train to head across Poland in search of a girl Don had fallen for on an earlier train journey.
They find themselves in Abel, a small summer resort - in the middle of winter - where they eventually find the girl. They also find Jacek, a friendly English-teaching Pole, and, crucially, his mother, the beautiful, intriguing Krystyna. It becomes her book, in two ways: firstly, by her character, her experiences in pre-and post-War Poland (Don's family too had lived and suffered in war-torn Poland) and later work as a scientist in America; secondly because it is she who convinces Kennedy that only he, as an outsider, can write Don's latest story, of the forlorn trip to Abel.
It ends with heart-wrenching adjustments of perspective for both Don and Kennedy, perspectives on love, life, history and loss.
But it is wonderfully funny getting there. The jokes crackle through the prose, but are there for a purpose - to delineate the character of the relationship between the buddies, Kennedy and Don. But they still add immeasurably to the reader's pleasure in a sparkling and understatedly moving novel.
I'm so glad someone had the nous to publish this book.
David Rose is the author of the 'anti-novel' Vault.
October 2011, in the blog Inside Books, by Simon Quicke
There are several things going on here ranging from the finding yourself type tale, the I want to write something but what should I write story and a pure old fashioned love story. The fact that they are intertwined and done so with great humour and a brilliant sense of location makes this the interesting read it ends up being.
The central axis of the book is the friendship between English teacher Nolan Kennedy and his erratic friend Don Darius. They met in Istanbul, where the story starts with Kennedy drifting along struggling with his own writing but determined to get the work of his friend published. Darius has left a manuscript that Kennedy thinks is a work of genius and he sets off to track his friend down in Eastern Europe to convince him that it should be edited and published.
Darius turns out to be a friendly chap who has a love of vodka and a less than enthusiastic relationship with writing suffering from bouts of indifference and lack of confidence. Plus he is on a mission to find the woman he glimpsed on a journey and fell in love with. Tracking her down involves heading off on the Laikonik Express into the snow covered streets of Poland and into a world that is strange and fuzzy as the vodka numbs the senses but creates a platform to develop friendships.
Kennedy is living life through his hopes for his friend and by the conclusion of the love story it is his own tale of traveling and his own doomed relationship with a Chinese girl that seems not only to match that of Darius but to overtake it in terms of literary value. He just hasn't seen it yet in his idolization of his friend.
Love might not blossom like the movies but the chance for it to find a way drives the narrative and for a while gives both friends a sense of purpose. Once that has lifted the harder challenge of working out what to do with life emerges as something that Kennedy at least seems to be aware he must face.
The description of small Polish villages, out of the way bars and the rail network in Eastern Europe are all delivered expertly from someone who has clearly spent some time in that part of the world. The experience of writing and the challenge of finding a subject is also something you suspect that the author has wrestled with but with this coming of realisation story about love, friendship, booze and literature he has been able to deliver a narrative that draws you in and keeps you going.
See the original here and find out what Simon Quicke has to say about other books, life and literature in general.
June 2011, in issue 36 of The View From Here magazine, from a review by Megan Taylor
Laikonik Express is a story of Americans abroad, a road trip of a novel where the roads have been replaced by rail and a sprawling US landscape forsaken for the frozen streets, turrets and stark blocks of a changing Europe.
The book begins as Kennedy, who has been teaching English in Istanbul, travels overland to Poland to seek out his old comrade, Don Darius, in order to persuade him not to squander his writing talents. Don, whose masterpiece of a manuscript Kennedy has rescued from the trash, is a man whose life has become increasingly hemmed in by drink and disillusion, but when Kennedy finds him, he's caught up by a whole new distraction - Ola, the woman he met briefly on the Laikonik Express. He's determined to track her down, and he's dragging Kennedy along with him. and it is this journey, traversing a country of courageous people 'who have lived through oppression and repression, and now they were going to take on capitalism', which forms the heart of this novel.
For all the determined wayward drinking and playful banter of its protagonists, Laikonik Express is often a quiet, contemplative book. Through Kennedy's debates, Sweeney deftly explores a land battered by history, and now struggling to hold onto its identity before the insidious influence of the West. Ideas turn and gather alongside the relentless snow, the novel's political and philosophical discussions reinforced by a powerful sense of place and a vivid portrait of its people.
It isn't just the main characters who are carefully drawn, but the story's extras too, the people glimpsed, often momentarily, in the warm bars and rattling carriages where Kennedy and Don spend much of the novel. Again and again, I'd stop to reconsider these passing strangers. There is a sense of story to everyone, from 'a gaggle of nuns done up in brown... faces glowing as pale as the flesh of veal calves' to 'a woman who looked like she was on the way to a wedding, in a pastel coat and a frothy hat, though on her feet were the obligatory moonboots that made her look, when she paused to button her mittens, as if she was standing in a plant pot'.
Laikonik Express is about bumbling and wondering and missing trains. It is also a book about writing, and trying to make sense - but mostly it's about searching for new ways of being, in both the political and the personal. It's about the importance of every journey, about the hope of discovering a new path through.
See the online version of The View From Here.
Megan Taylor is the author of How We Were Lost (Flame Books 2007), The Dawning (Weathervane Press 2010) and The Lives of Ghosts (Weathervane Press 2012). See her website here.
May 2011, in the Eastern Daily Press, by Donna Louise Bishop
Much like James Cameron's Avatar, Nick Sweeney has taken the fundamental basics for a good story and turned them into something wonderful too create the amusing and thoughtful Laikonik Express.
Embracing the trio of life's joys and must-haves Sweeney combines the road trip (or in this case the train trip), an unlikely friendship and its development, and a quest.
His protagonist Nolan Kennedy, described as a 'youngish' American, is teaching English in Istanbul. While doing so he has been hanging out with his serendipitous father figure Don Darius, who is also a teacher of English and a drunk.
Upon finding Darius's novel tossed away in a bin, Kennedy is stunned by it and is determined to be reunited with Darius to get him serious about the novel before he gets too serious about the vodka.
The book takes the reader through a picaresque journey through the Poland of the early 1990s, set in both Warsaw and in a small town on the coast.
Kennedy accompanies Darius on this wild goose chase to tha back of Polish beyond, after discovering Darius's motivation: the love of a good woman. But once the two reach their destination and find the woman to love, their journey takes them both completely by surprise.
The woman they are in search of is a woman Darius has met on the Laikonik Express, which runs from Krakow in the south of Poland to Gdynia on the Baltic Sea. Once the reader gets past the slowish start and the story begins to unfold, it is easy to get lost in the pace and become surrounded by the different smells, tastes and sounds of the culture it weaves through.
The unlikely friendship works and the battle for literature is amusing among the vodka-ridden central European setting and Sweeney, who lived in Poland for four years, brings the country and its people alive.
Celebrating the country's unique wintry atmosphere, Sweeney creates the feeling of aimlessness and uses the exploration of friendship and romance to make this book work.
Ultimately this is a story of two men who are distracting themselves by taking chances and pausing to reflect on what life has to offer. Above all, though, it is a story about embracing hope.
18th May 2011, another Amazon review, by Lander Hawes
Nick Sweeney's novel is full of resonances and echoes: Sal Paradise buddy talk here, Joycean close consciousness and wordplay there. Read too fast and you'll miss them. Laikonik Express's settings, its cross-country train journeys and looping metropolitan walks, have the flavour of these influences. It's a novel of streets, bars, carriages, churches and encounters between strangers, in which the actions of the leading characters are frequently punctuated by the hospitality or indifference of local citizens and passers-by.
The tone, rueful and amused, hopeful yet a little careworn, manifests its presence throughout. For the reader, a sense of being confided, of being poked in the ribs and wisecracked to, accumulates. It's a stylised, rock and roll diction, and when it works well it makes Laikonik Express a performance.
Nick Sweeney touches on a smorgasbord of preoccupations. Emotionally, it's a novel that's by turns sentimental, wistful, optimistic and humanistic. It celebrates friendship; its possibilities and its responsibilities, and in that sense Laikonik Express reminds me of Ghostbusters.
Lander Hawes has a story in Unthank Books' Unthology No 2, and his novel Captivity was published by Unthank Books in April 2012.
15th May 2011, customer review on Amazon by the enigmatically titled Red Mary
The road trip at the centre of 'Lakonik Express' is mostly by rail but don't let that little detail get in the way of your intense enjoyment of this gem of a novel. From the opening sequence to the final chapter the ghost of Kerouac at his best nudges your appreciation of the many vividly realised vignettes linked loosely by a slightly surreal chase narrative. The characters are marvellous (especially the strongly drawn women). The many profound observations are balanced by as many that are whimsical and there is an overarching wit that refuses to take the story too seriously. This is the sort of book that tends to acquire cult status but for the author's sake I hope it will achieve immediate recognition and encourage further publication of Sweeney's work.
Amazon page here.
As a subject for a novel the road trip - or rail trip in the case of "Laikonik Express" - but in his full length debut Nick Sweeney has injected new life into the genre. I've tended to avoid road trip writing of late: somehow the trips are never nearly as interesting or exciting as my own. In "Laikonik Express", though, I found a setting almost tailor-made for my own travel predilections, characters that I found both credible and engaging and more than its fair share of wry humour.
The story is simple yet as multi-layered as you want it to be. Nolan Kennedy, a young American teacher of English living and working in Istanbul has to find his friend (and alcoholic) Don Darius, a writer of sorts. Nolan has found a manuscript in the bin, an unfinished novel penned by his friend. Nolan is struck by its greatness and, determined to see it published; he sets out to persuade Don Darius to do something about it. The trouble is that Don Darius has gone off in search of a woman he met on a train journey through Eastern Europe on the Laikonik Express; unless he does, he won't be able to write. Nolan has to find him.
You can use all the clichés in the book to describe "Laikonik Express" - road (or rail trip), coming of age novel (though admittedly the protagonists aren't exactly gap year travellers), a story of friendship, of discovery...and it is all of those but "Laikonik Express" has such an original voice that it transcends all those descriptions and comes into a class of its own. The style of narration is slick and cool; there's almost a beat voice going on and there's plenty of insight without too much introspection. There are shades of Hunter S. Thompson, of Kerouac and even Salinger but Sweeney does have a clear, distinct voice. Don't believe the hype: descriptions of "Laikonik Express" as a "Sideways with vodka" don't do Sweeney's book justice.
This is a road-trip for the slacker generation: if you must compare it against a film, it's what "Before Sunrise" would have been like had Jesse and Delphine been as cool as they thought they were. But, more than that, this is the real Eastern Europe and Sweeney totally captures the settings. This is every train trip I've been on in the Balkans, and every grimy down at heel post communist town I've visited. I love that Sweeney writes about the "real" places, this isn't a travelogue and he's no literary tour guide. It's obvious that Sweeney knows this part of the world, so brilliantly does he capture the essence of these places, but he happily avoids presenting a thinly disguised version of his own experiences.
I loved the relationship between Don Darius and Nolan; I loved the way their committed attitude to finding Don Darius's mystery woman negates the fact that probably both are using the trip to avoid doing anything more useful or important. It's interesting that Nolan makes the trip for Don Darius: I didn't get a feeling that there was much solidity in their friendship which makes all the more interesting that he goes to such lengths for the writer. I'm not sure that the nature of their friendship was explored as fully as it could have been. With other characters, too, I felt that the development was slightly lacking but it didn't spoil my enjoyment.
The narration is peppered with cultural references which work for the most part but were occasionally lost on me. Perhaps because I found I identified so much with the author, the characters and the settings I was prepared to go along with this in spite of it becoming a little tedious and show-offish in places.
Atmospheric, hugely funny and poignant where it needs to be "Laikonik Express" - even the name makes me smile - is a remarkable debut. This is a book I will read again and again.
See the Curious Books Fans site here.
February 2012 in Necessary Fiction, by Susan Jupp
Nick Sweeney’s novel Laikonik Express is named after a long-distance train that runs between Krakow and Gdynia in Poland but we do not meet this “central character” until the narrator, Nolan Kennedy, has already travelled from Istanbul, where he lives, to Warsaw.
Kennedy has found an abandoned typescript by his friend Don Darius when the latter left his flat to move to Warsaw. Convinced that this is a major literary work, Kennedy is on his way to see Don, as the novel opens, to persuade him of the novel’s worth. Don has another priority, however: to trace a woman he met on a train.
The title provides the name of the train but also – more importantly – the experience of travelling with its views, glimpses and snippets of other lives, its chance encounters and overheard conversations, risks and opportunities. For that is what this book is about: Kennedy and Darius are travellers, observers, story-tellers, “people overseas”, who recount what they see and hear but do not necessarily go below the surface to understand more.
Laikonik Express is set in Poland in 1992. Nick Sweeney, who lived there from 1992 to 1996, says he wrote it hoping to capture the atmosphere of both changing times and the special climate of “silence in the snow” of winter.
The cold and snow are ever-present, since the characters have to struggle through them and the reader certainly feels the cold and damp. There are walks: around Warsaw, in Gdynia and Abel (a resort on the Baltic Sea) but much of the action takes place indoors: in bars especially (for warmth as well as refreshment), in flats, at stations and on trains, even in cars.
We get to know the main characters very well indeed. Kennedy, the narrator, is American, a teacher of English as a foreign language (EFL) in Istanbul. Don Darius is also an American EFL teacher, now in Warsaw, previously in Istanbul and before that in Saudi Arabia. Don describes them both as “lonesome world-weary loafers … overseas and out of place”. Jacek is a Polish teacher of English and PhD student of linguistics who rescues Kennedy and Don when they arrive in Abel. Krystyna is Jack’s mother, a former scientist who once worked in the USA, now seriously ill with cancer. Ola, the object of Don’s search, we only see briefly but do not meet; she remains pale. Ling (Kennedy’s Chinese girlfriend) and Kennedy’s dead father (a “beat”) we get to know well, through Kennedy’s reflections during the downtime of travel.
Other characters, often barely seen or heard, are vivid, and described in a style that represents the novel as a whole – humorous, good-tempered.
Kennedy has ostensibly left Istanbul to find Don after discovering his typescript: “Then it kind of turned into one of those mysteries that gets you out of your armchair and onto trains, investigating.”
Is this an expression of friendship, one of the novel’s themes? On the surface perhaps, but Kennedy realises that he has other motivations. This was also a trial separation from Ling, whom her father would soon send back to China – separating them forever.
Words and writing and symbols often feature in the text, whether in the Chinese characters Kennedy practices or, strikingly, as a path in the snow: “Kennedy’s thoughts careered in and out, fonts changing, going big and small and plain and fancy, and he let them write themselves onto the snow so that he could follow the trail of them back to the hotel.”
The conversations, particularly between Kennedy and Darius, sound authentic: colloquial, sometimes foul-mouthed, with nicknames, plays on words, shared references to literature, films, music; their banter (often drink or drug induced) carries the “story” along with little effort on the reader’s part – except not to miss (easily done) the occasional pearl. Kennedy’s reflections are stream of consciousness, frequently very funny and occasionally poetic.
On the surface, much is flippant and light-hearted in Laikonik Express, nothing violent or nasty – except for Krystyna’s illness. Some scenes are pure slapstick, such as the encounter with a ticket inspector. Many jokes revolve around misunderstandings of English. For example, a scene with a fellow passenger who announces – to two teachers of English as a foreign language – that he has not understand a word of their English!
So what is it all about? Kennedy has come full circle still “lost in words” but the action of travel (as opposed to writing) has had a positive effect on his love for Ling. The difficult question of being “people overseas” has been temporarily resolved. Don has achieved the success of which Kennedy was the harbinger. Kennedy has written the story behind the story, as Krystyna made him promise to do …
It is a brave narration that includes so much detail, filling the novel of 296 pages. There is a risk that a reader could take exception to the tone (too brash, too clever?) and look for more structure, more depth in the topics raised (the new Poland, for example). However, Laikonik Express is an example of the journey being more important than the destination, the travelling of more value than the getting there – even with a happy ending.
See the full review here.
February 2012, customer review on Amazon by David Rose
I loved this book; a novel of friendship, love and loss, history and loss, literature and loss...
An American, known throughout by his surname - Kennedy - living and teaching in Istanbul, takes the eponymous train across Europe to Poland, in search of fellow American, his buddy Don; in search too, of clarification as to the novel manuscript Don has abandoned in Istanbul. Can Kennedy persuade Don it's the masterpiece Kennedy believes it to be?
No sooner settling to sleep in Don's Warsaw apartment, Kennedy is dragged back onto the train to head across Poland in search of a girl Don had fallen for on an earlier train journey.
They find themselves in Abel, a small summer resort - in the middle of winter - where they eventually find the girl. They also find Jacek, a friendly English-teaching Pole, and, crucially, his mother, the beautiful, intriguing Krystyna. It becomes her book, in two ways: firstly, by her character, her experiences in pre-and post-War Poland (Don's family too had lived and suffered in war-torn Poland) and later work as a scientist in America; secondly because it is she who convinces Kennedy that only he, as an outsider, can write Don's latest story, of the forlorn trip to Abel.
It ends with heart-wrenching adjustments of perspective for both Don and Kennedy, perspectives on love, life, history and loss.
But it is wonderfully funny getting there. The jokes crackle through the prose, but are there for a purpose - to delineate the character of the relationship between the buddies, Kennedy and Don. But they still add immeasurably to the reader's pleasure in a sparkling and understatedly moving novel.
I'm so glad someone had the nous to publish this book.
David Rose is the author of the 'anti-novel' Vault.
October 2011, in the blog Inside Books, by Simon Quicke
There are several things going on here ranging from the finding yourself type tale, the I want to write something but what should I write story and a pure old fashioned love story. The fact that they are intertwined and done so with great humour and a brilliant sense of location makes this the interesting read it ends up being.
The central axis of the book is the friendship between English teacher Nolan Kennedy and his erratic friend Don Darius. They met in Istanbul, where the story starts with Kennedy drifting along struggling with his own writing but determined to get the work of his friend published. Darius has left a manuscript that Kennedy thinks is a work of genius and he sets off to track his friend down in Eastern Europe to convince him that it should be edited and published.
Darius turns out to be a friendly chap who has a love of vodka and a less than enthusiastic relationship with writing suffering from bouts of indifference and lack of confidence. Plus he is on a mission to find the woman he glimpsed on a journey and fell in love with. Tracking her down involves heading off on the Laikonik Express into the snow covered streets of Poland and into a world that is strange and fuzzy as the vodka numbs the senses but creates a platform to develop friendships.
Kennedy is living life through his hopes for his friend and by the conclusion of the love story it is his own tale of traveling and his own doomed relationship with a Chinese girl that seems not only to match that of Darius but to overtake it in terms of literary value. He just hasn't seen it yet in his idolization of his friend.
Love might not blossom like the movies but the chance for it to find a way drives the narrative and for a while gives both friends a sense of purpose. Once that has lifted the harder challenge of working out what to do with life emerges as something that Kennedy at least seems to be aware he must face.
The description of small Polish villages, out of the way bars and the rail network in Eastern Europe are all delivered expertly from someone who has clearly spent some time in that part of the world. The experience of writing and the challenge of finding a subject is also something you suspect that the author has wrestled with but with this coming of realisation story about love, friendship, booze and literature he has been able to deliver a narrative that draws you in and keeps you going.
See the original here and find out what Simon Quicke has to say about other books, life and literature in general.
June 2011, in issue 36 of The View From Here magazine, from a review by Megan Taylor
Laikonik Express is a story of Americans abroad, a road trip of a novel where the roads have been replaced by rail and a sprawling US landscape forsaken for the frozen streets, turrets and stark blocks of a changing Europe.
The book begins as Kennedy, who has been teaching English in Istanbul, travels overland to Poland to seek out his old comrade, Don Darius, in order to persuade him not to squander his writing talents. Don, whose masterpiece of a manuscript Kennedy has rescued from the trash, is a man whose life has become increasingly hemmed in by drink and disillusion, but when Kennedy finds him, he's caught up by a whole new distraction - Ola, the woman he met briefly on the Laikonik Express. He's determined to track her down, and he's dragging Kennedy along with him. and it is this journey, traversing a country of courageous people 'who have lived through oppression and repression, and now they were going to take on capitalism', which forms the heart of this novel.
For all the determined wayward drinking and playful banter of its protagonists, Laikonik Express is often a quiet, contemplative book. Through Kennedy's debates, Sweeney deftly explores a land battered by history, and now struggling to hold onto its identity before the insidious influence of the West. Ideas turn and gather alongside the relentless snow, the novel's political and philosophical discussions reinforced by a powerful sense of place and a vivid portrait of its people.
It isn't just the main characters who are carefully drawn, but the story's extras too, the people glimpsed, often momentarily, in the warm bars and rattling carriages where Kennedy and Don spend much of the novel. Again and again, I'd stop to reconsider these passing strangers. There is a sense of story to everyone, from 'a gaggle of nuns done up in brown... faces glowing as pale as the flesh of veal calves' to 'a woman who looked like she was on the way to a wedding, in a pastel coat and a frothy hat, though on her feet were the obligatory moonboots that made her look, when she paused to button her mittens, as if she was standing in a plant pot'.
Laikonik Express is about bumbling and wondering and missing trains. It is also a book about writing, and trying to make sense - but mostly it's about searching for new ways of being, in both the political and the personal. It's about the importance of every journey, about the hope of discovering a new path through.
See the online version of The View From Here.
Megan Taylor is the author of How We Were Lost (Flame Books 2007), The Dawning (Weathervane Press 2010) and The Lives of Ghosts (Weathervane Press 2012). See her website here.
May 2011, in the Eastern Daily Press, by Donna Louise Bishop
Much like James Cameron's Avatar, Nick Sweeney has taken the fundamental basics for a good story and turned them into something wonderful too create the amusing and thoughtful Laikonik Express.
Embracing the trio of life's joys and must-haves Sweeney combines the road trip (or in this case the train trip), an unlikely friendship and its development, and a quest.
His protagonist Nolan Kennedy, described as a 'youngish' American, is teaching English in Istanbul. While doing so he has been hanging out with his serendipitous father figure Don Darius, who is also a teacher of English and a drunk.
Upon finding Darius's novel tossed away in a bin, Kennedy is stunned by it and is determined to be reunited with Darius to get him serious about the novel before he gets too serious about the vodka.
The book takes the reader through a picaresque journey through the Poland of the early 1990s, set in both Warsaw and in a small town on the coast.
Kennedy accompanies Darius on this wild goose chase to tha back of Polish beyond, after discovering Darius's motivation: the love of a good woman. But once the two reach their destination and find the woman to love, their journey takes them both completely by surprise.
The woman they are in search of is a woman Darius has met on the Laikonik Express, which runs from Krakow in the south of Poland to Gdynia on the Baltic Sea. Once the reader gets past the slowish start and the story begins to unfold, it is easy to get lost in the pace and become surrounded by the different smells, tastes and sounds of the culture it weaves through.
The unlikely friendship works and the battle for literature is amusing among the vodka-ridden central European setting and Sweeney, who lived in Poland for four years, brings the country and its people alive.
Celebrating the country's unique wintry atmosphere, Sweeney creates the feeling of aimlessness and uses the exploration of friendship and romance to make this book work.
Ultimately this is a story of two men who are distracting themselves by taking chances and pausing to reflect on what life has to offer. Above all, though, it is a story about embracing hope.
18th May 2011, another Amazon review, by Lander Hawes
Nick Sweeney's novel is full of resonances and echoes: Sal Paradise buddy talk here, Joycean close consciousness and wordplay there. Read too fast and you'll miss them. Laikonik Express's settings, its cross-country train journeys and looping metropolitan walks, have the flavour of these influences. It's a novel of streets, bars, carriages, churches and encounters between strangers, in which the actions of the leading characters are frequently punctuated by the hospitality or indifference of local citizens and passers-by.
The tone, rueful and amused, hopeful yet a little careworn, manifests its presence throughout. For the reader, a sense of being confided, of being poked in the ribs and wisecracked to, accumulates. It's a stylised, rock and roll diction, and when it works well it makes Laikonik Express a performance.
Nick Sweeney touches on a smorgasbord of preoccupations. Emotionally, it's a novel that's by turns sentimental, wistful, optimistic and humanistic. It celebrates friendship; its possibilities and its responsibilities, and in that sense Laikonik Express reminds me of Ghostbusters.
Lander Hawes has a story in Unthank Books' Unthology No 2, and his novel Captivity was published by Unthank Books in April 2012.
15th May 2011, customer review on Amazon by the enigmatically titled Red Mary
The road trip at the centre of 'Lakonik Express' is mostly by rail but don't let that little detail get in the way of your intense enjoyment of this gem of a novel. From the opening sequence to the final chapter the ghost of Kerouac at his best nudges your appreciation of the many vividly realised vignettes linked loosely by a slightly surreal chase narrative. The characters are marvellous (especially the strongly drawn women). The many profound observations are balanced by as many that are whimsical and there is an overarching wit that refuses to take the story too seriously. This is the sort of book that tends to acquire cult status but for the author's sake I hope it will achieve immediate recognition and encourage further publication of Sweeney's work.
Amazon page here.