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Six years' waiting for another Nino Ricci novel...
Worth the patience - as this quintessentially Montreal tale creates for this Montrealer, a zone of both comfort and awe. My own reality unfolds on these familiar streets, at these long-loved sites, and this narrative takes on a dimension of collective biography: much more than mere fiction.
There is no "mere" fiction in this: there is solidity and intricacy both, in historical, sociological, geographical and touristic components. And the nineteen eighties are so vivid that they feel like a first-time experience.
I attended Concordia University then, as did Nino Ricci, as does his protagonist...So, the "infamously ugly Hall building", where I sat for lectures, and which I drive by every day in the present time is, indeed, that place where we all overused the word "numinous" back in those Chernobyl-tainted days.
The two solitudes, which Canadians know as the English and French "realities" (for want of a better descriptor) are obliquely and peripherally viewed through ethnicities as diverse as the travel destinations of the main character. The unique Quebec bilingualism is palpably real in this: no italics in many places for many French words which Anglophones just use untranslated.
Between Montreal, Toronto, Sweden and the Galapagos Islands, Alex, the graduate student, experiences one rite of passage after another. And the reader is given passage: along his women, their own issues, his language student and those issues, a shady travel acquaintance who never quite emerges from his mystique, a rather insipid therapist, his parents, his son, a professor.
There is suicide in here and chronic illness and accidental death. There are birth and abortion, greed and generosity, duty and desire, insight and insouciance.
And there is the origin of species because, as the author himself says, having been captivated by Darwin and his ideas, "I kept thinking I gotta figure out a way to do something with the man. I knew there was something in his thinking that connected with a strain in my thinking."
Ricci writes: "Note: The end point of evolution, if there was one, would be the perfect creature: contradictory impulses resolved, no thoughts, no needs, no rage; able to see through rocks; to survive without eating; to change things by force of will. To live forever. It would be exactly what it had displaced. It would be God."
Read this, people. It's long-listed for the Giller Prize. It's top-notch Canadian fiction, by someone who's been called "an extraordinarily subtle writer", "a superb stylist" and "a fantastic storyteller". As far back as 1985, Nino Ricci had his next 6 novels planned. This one, as the others did, delivers, from dormancy, a true literary treasure.
Doubleday, Canada, 472 pp.
Rating: 8.75/10
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Of all known institutions, I attend only two: church, in my heart, and school, in yours. Both are subject to demolition. - Lucie Adams, 2007
It is only for poetry to know how many stanzas fit into one caress. - Lucie Adams, 2008
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"Testament" by Nino Ricci
