The Origin of Species Read online

  Praise for the origin of species

  “In this winner of the Governor General’s Award for fiction, Alex, a young Italian Canadian in 1980s Montreal, achingly needs to write, to talk, to make order of his life and of the clutter of information he has accumulated. He also wants a girlfriend. Because Ricci is a skilled, language-loving writer, Alex’s life as a skilled, language-loving writer is a rich journey.”

  —Globe 100 Best Books

  “Most memorable among the novel’s virtuoso set pieces are a stunning heart-of-darkness episode in the Galápagos and a conjunction of storytelling and evolutionary survival involving the courtship ritual of the masked booby. Deconstruction is relatively easy, Ricci’s book tells us; what is heroic is our struggle to construct, to change and evolve, to be loving and compassionate, and to tell each other stories of hope.”

  —Quill & Quire

  “Told in windowpane prose, this story reads as if it has come up through our collective memory. With the shock of recognition, we gain a new understanding of our fragility and our strength.”

  ~ Governor General’s Award Jury Citation ~

  “Ricci’s masterstroke to date. This novel does so well, on so many levels, that it’s hard to know where to begin tallying up the riches … An ambitious, thrilling novel that resists encapsulation and takes not a single misstep … it is also bitterly, achingly funny.”

  —Toronto Star

  “The Origin of Species is a profoundly moving novel that lovingly creates a world of flawed but very real characters.”

  —Winnipeg Free Press

  “An entertaining and emotionally rewarding read, this book will transport Nino Ricci to further heights of literary stardom and could well overtake his first, Lives of the Saints, as his signature work—much as the original Origin of Species did to the career and life of Charles Darwin.”

  —Ottawa Citizen

  Praise for lives of the saints

  “This is a marvelously told story, unbearably poignant … I can hardly think of a book I have enjoyed more this year.”

  —JUSTIN CARTWRIGHT, The Telegraph

  “Extraordinary and dazzling.”

  —Times Literary Supplement

  “An impressive debut … more will be heard from this author.”

  —The Guardian

  “[Nino Ricci] has written a first novel with hardly a false note.”

  —The Observer

  “Lives of the Saints is simple, moving, and compelling.”

  —The Spectator

  “A beautifully paced and measured first novel … an extraordinary story—brooding and ironic, suffused with yearning, tender and lucid and gritty … perfect pitch and brilliant descriptive powers.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  “Nino Ricci’s complex and skillfully fashioned tale of life in an Italian Apennine village offers pleasure too seldom present in contemporary fiction: full and involving characterizations, an exhilarating combination of tightly knit plot and episodic looseness, and a rich sense of lives lived truly communally, in conflict and in balance with one another … exudes a dazzling breadth and richness.”

  —USA Today

  “A book to celebrate—a wise, poignant, and poised novel.”

  —Wall Street Journal

  “A fine, artful piece of work … a powerful tale.”

  —Washington Post

  “This seems to me to be literature at its best, a sense of life lived, a sense of life felt, not without dreams, not without poetry, but without fakery.”

  —Toronto Star

  “In a forgotten village lost to time and the world, Nino Ricci unfolds a tragedy of nearly mythic proportions.”

  —Le Monde

  Praise for in a glass house

  “Splendidly, even forcefully written, this is a novel which nags at the soul.”

  —Glasgow Herald

  “Compelling in its artistry … [Ricci is] an extraordinarily subtle writer.”

  —The Guardian

  “Ricci has written a profound essay on the human soul.”

  —Sunday Telegraph

  “Full of sensitive, insightful writing … a strongly voiced and engaging book … Ricci’s observations about family dynamics … are frequently elegant.”

  —Boston Sunday Globe

  “Lyrical.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “A superbly sad story … Nino Ricci’s triumph.”

  —Washington Post

  “In A Glass House is a haunting, lyrical, intelligent coming-of-age novel … the acuity of its observations, the eloquence of its prose, and the hard-earned wisdom of its final pages make it a genuine achievement.”

  —New York Times Book Review

  Praise for where she has gone

  “A superb stylist whose unpretentious prose carries an emotional charge that gathers so slowly and surely that we’re surprised to find ourselves so moved by his characters’ stoically borne crises.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Ricci’s poetic prose and fluid plot create a tense and beautiful story whose sad ironies achieve resolution in a haunting conclusion.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “Ricci has spun out a delicate and soulful novel.”

  —TIME

  “Outstanding … the work of a writer arrived at startling maturity … The novel’s language and rhythms are quietly extraordinary, both loose-limbed and intense, moving with fluid grace between the sharp here and now of Toronto or rural Italy and the brooding landscape of Victor’s mind … vibrant with life.”

  —Times Literary Supplement

  “Ricci manipulates our expectations with an adept, steady hand.”

  —Time Out London

  “Absorbing and moving.”

  —Sunday Times

  “The smooth surface of Ricci’s prose belies the novel’s richness as it builds surely and lucidly toward a poignant, bittersweet conclusion: Ricci’s exploration of the rupture between old world and new is masterful.”

  —The Observer

  Praise for testament

  “In the beauty of its language, its rich detail of place and character, its humanity and grace and sense of wonder, Nino Ricci’s Testament both transcends and revalidates the so-called historical novel. Religion aside, history aside, this is a lovely work of fiction.”

  —TIM O’BRIEN, author of July, July

  “A hypnotic, deeply lyrical presentation of four gospels … A writer of impeccable craft … recreating, in his incantatory prose, the very aroma and the wild, sorcery-filled world through which Jesus walked.”

  —PICO IYER, Los Angeles Times Book Review

  “Nino Ricci pulls off a genuine tour-de-force. Testament’s last fifty pages are grisly, wrenching, and utterly absorbing—Yeshua’s all-too-human suffering and death have a real and terrible power, unrelieved by lightning flashes of divinity or miraculous interventions.”

  —Washington Post

  “Testament is a remarkable retelling of the Jesus story, doing what great art always does—making what is familiar suddenly fresh, daring, challenging. You will never think of the characters of the gospel accounts in the same way again, which is the good news of this stunning novel.”

  —REVEREND STEPHEN KENDRICK, senior minister, First and Second Church, Boston

  “The sum of these various reminiscences makes a highly readable narrative … There is, moreover, an element of suspense that is sustained throughout the novel despite—or even because of—the universally known outcome of Jesus’s career.”

  —Toronto Star

  “Ricci has given us a contemporary Jesus. Like a palimpsest, with each fresh image superimposed on earlier images, Ricci’s Jesus testifies to the inexha
ustible power of story, reminding us that enduring myths are not windows through which we view objective truths, but mirrors framing our own evanescent mortality and morality plays.”

  —Globe and Mail

  “Testament, a refracted biography of Jesus, becomes too an examination of storytelling itself, for what is Jesus of Nazareth if not a teller of stories? … From the good book Ricci has fashioned a great story.”

  —Quill & Quire

  “Covers new, daunting, and unexpected territory … Much of this retelling accumulates a mysterious power of its own, even as it roils the reader.”

  —Commonweal

  “A uniquely down-to-earth treatment of the life of Christ that plunges the reader into the sounds, smells, and emotions of his Jewish world.”

  —Utne Reader

  “Ricci transcends the stale confines of ’the historical Jesus’ debate and invites us into that imaginative region where Jesus finds a living context.”

  —DR. BRUCE CHILTON, director, Institute for Advanced Theology, Bard College, and author of Rabbi Jesus: An Intimate Biography

  “This is a remarkable work—immensely savvy about the nature of human longing, compassionate about human failure, and illuminating about the trajectory of the hero. It’s beautifully written, an endeavor both humble and risky.”

  —BARRY LOPEZ, author of Arctic Dreams

  In memory of Esther

  … as with the individual, so with the species, the hour of life has run its course, and is spent.

  CHARLES DARWIN

  The Voyage of the Beagle

  one

  — May 1986 —

  There has never been a document of culture which was not at one and the same time a document of barbarism.

  WALTER BENJAMIN

  “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” VII

  – 1 –

  The girl standing in the foyer when Alex went down to get his mail, trembling slightly on her cane, was Esther. Not a girl, really: a woman. Everyone in the building knew her. Or everyone, it seemed, except Alex, who, in the few months since he’d moved here, had never quite managed to be the one to open a door for her, or put her key in her mailbox, or start a conversation with her in the oppressive intimacy of the building’s elevators.

  She was looking out through the plate glass of the entrance doors to the street, where sunlight now glinted off the morning’s earlier sprinkling of rain.

  “I wouldn’t go out there if you don’t have to,” Alex said, then regretted at once his admonitory tone.

  From the confusion that came over her, plain as if a shadow had crossed her, it was clear she hadn’t understood.

  “The rain,” he said.

  “Oh!” She looked up through her thickish glasses at the now cloudless sky and her whole face seemed to twist with the strain of trying to follow his meaning.

  “Chernobyl,” he said, making a botch of it. “The fallout. They say you shouldn’t go out if it’s rained.”

  “Oh-h-h!” She drew the word out as if in understanding. “Really? They say that? Oh!”

  “They’re saying the clouds might pick the radiation up over Russia, then dump it somewhere else. At least, I think that’s what they’re saying.”

  It suddenly occurred to Alex, though the story had been practically the only thing in the news since the Swedes had broken it a few days before, that she didn’t have any idea what he was talking about.

  “You know, I heard about that,” she said, and Alex was relieved. “About Chernobyl. Isn’t it awful?”

  They stood there an instant while Alex half-turned, not wanting to put his back to her, and awkwardly retrieved his mail, which was just junk, it looked like. But in that instant’s lull it seemed he’d lost whatever conversational thread there’d been between them.

  Esther was still standing at the doors, neither going out nor coming in.

  “You wouldn’t happen to have a cigarette, would you?” she said finally, looking right at him. “I mean, if you could spare one.”

  That was how the day had got started. Alex did indeed have cigarettes, but up in his apartment, and although he’d considered lying—he didn’t like the idea of giving a cigarette to someone who was clearly Not Well—it finally ended up, despite his protestations that he simply fetch one for her, that Esther followed him to his place to get one herself. There weren’t any more awkward silences from then on: in the elevator Esther launched at once into a disarming rush of revealing personal anecdote, so that by the time they got out at Alex’s floor he was dizzy with excess information.

  “What about you? I don’t even know your name.”

  “Alex. It’s Alex.” Then he added, stupidly, “Alex Fratarcangeli.”

  “Oh! Really? Frater—oh! That’s interesting.”

  “Don’t worry,” he said quickly. “I can’t even pronounce it myself.” Alex’s apartment was on the seventeenth floor, which had been the chief selling point when he’d rented the place, some feeling still surging in him—hope? vertigo?—each time he opened his door to the expanse of cityscape and sky through his living room windows. He’d left the radio on, tuned to the CBC: there was an interview coming up with the prime minister that Alex was perversely anxious to catch, largely because he despised the prime minister, from the very depth of his being, despised every false word that dropped from his big-chinned false mouth. He could hear the interview coming on as he unlocked the door, Peter Gzowski’s honeyed coo and then the mellow low of the prime minister, false, false, although Peter, and this was the side of him that Alex couldn’t stomach, simply carried on in his fawning amiability as if the man was actually to be taken seriously.

  Esther was still talking. So far, Alex had learned that she was a student, as he was, at Concordia, though he hadn’t been able to gather in exactly what; that she’d grown up in Côte St. Luc, a possibly Jewish neighborhood somewhere on the outskirts of the city, though he couldn’t have said exactly where; that she lived in the building because it had a pool in it, though he couldn’t quite reconcile this detail with her condition, which seemed to involve some issues of motor control. The fact was he was finding it hard to attend to her, not only because he was a bit overwhelmed by her barrage of talk and because he couldn’t quite help trying to catch the interview going on in the background, but because of a host of other matters clamoring for attention at the back of his brain: his appointment with Dr. Klein, for which he somehow already seemed destined to be late; his class at the Refugee Centre, for which he’d hardly prepared; his final lesson at Berlitz with Félix, his cash cow, and the concomitant prospect of a depressingly low-income summer; his theory exam the following day, for which he’d hardly studied. Then there was the phone call home he had to make, the post-exam party he had to host, the grant forms he had to fill out, and in the middle and not-so-far distance the questions he did not even dare to give a shape to at the moment, though they were the pit above which everything else seemed precariously suspended.

  In the background, the prime minister, having dodged the subject of Libya, was going on about Chernobyl, trying to cast himself as the calm leader in troubled times. Please, Peter, please, Alex thought, ask him a tough question. Though in truth, Alex revered Peter: he credited him with his own discovery of Canada, which had happened, ironically, in the couple of years since Alex had left Canada proper for the foreign country of Quebec. And he revered him despite his occasional fawning, his boyish stutter, his too frequent feel-good pieces on apple baking or native spiritualism or peewee hockey; and also despite, or maybe because of, the comments you sometimes read, usually buried by timid editors in the last paragraphs of lengthy profiles, that the instant the mike was turned off—though Alex could understand this perfectly: the mike was who he was, what he gave everything to—he turned into an unmitigated bastard.

  Esther, who by now had settled herself on his couch, was explaining to him the notion of something she called “an exacerbation.” With a start, Alex realized she had been tellin
g him about her illness. It began to sink in that she’d actually named it and he’d let that crucial bit of information get by him. Somehow, she’d managed to slip the thing in as if it were just a casual aside: Oh, by the way, I have blah-blah.

  “So what about you, Alex? What do you do?”

  “I’m at Concordia, too,” he said, realizing, guiltily, that he ought to have brought this up earlier. “I mean, I study there.”

  “Really? You don’t say! What a coincidence!”

  In fact, it wasn’t much of a coincidence at all: probably half the people in the building were students at Concordia, whose hub, the infamously ugly Hall Building, stood just kitty-corner to them.

  When Alex tried to explain his program his description struck him as even more convoluted and opaque than Esther’s had been of her own. He’d initially been admitted to the university under Interdisciplinary Studies, in a mix of literary theory and evolutionary biology, of all things. But then the university had decided it couldn’t handle such a broad crossing of disciplines and he’d ended up in the English Department.

  “I guess I’m trying to find the way to bring the arts and sciences together,” he said. “You know, a sort of Grand Unified Theory.”

  “Oh—you mean—art and science—”

  The shadow had crossed her again.

  “That’s just a fancy way of saying I don’t really know what I’m doing.”

  Alex had long ago handed over the cigarette Esther had come for, but she had placed it carefully in the little pink handbag in padded silk that she carried over her shoulder, struggling a bit with the clasp, though he hadn’t known whether to offer help. To have with her cappuccino, she’d said, which was where she’d been heading when Alex had run into her.