Nino Ricci is a busy full-time author -- an achievement that is as precious to many writers
as awards and recognition, both of which Ricci has also gained. His first novel, Lives of
the Saints (Cormorant, 1990) was the number one bestseller in Canada in 1991 and
earned Ricci a Governor General's Award for Fiction. Lives of the Saints introduced the
character of Vittorio, a young Italian boy traveling to Canada with his mother who dies
during the voyage. Ricci continued the story of Vittorio's life through a span of twenty
years in the subsequent novels In A Glass House (McClelland & Stewart, 1993) and
Where She Has Gone (M&S 1997).
The first thing that stands out about Ricci's writing is the influence of his Italian
background. Born in 1959, his parents were immigrants from the Molise region of Italy
living in Leamington, Ontario, the town of his birth. Ricci also has a talent for portraying
emotions and scenarios which come across as very real, regardless of one's ethnic
background.
Now that the trilogy is complete, Ricci is hard at work on a new novel. Even so,
he took some time to talk about character development, ethnicity in writing, and, of course, success.
Kirman: When you first started working on Lives of the Saints, did you know it was
going to turn into a trilogy?
Ricci: No. At the time I thought I was working on a single novel, but one that
encompassed the whole story that now comprises the trilogy. I had the whole story in my
mind; I just didn't know it was going to take me three novels to tell it all.
Kirman: At what point did it become obvious to you that it was going to turn into a
trilogy?
Ricci: I wouldn't say it was ever obvious until it actually happened. I started thinking,
for practical reasons, of a way I could divide up the material partly because I was doing a
master's at Concordia and I had to submit a book-length work of fiction as my thesis.
This project was ostensibly my thesis but I was a little worried that if I tried to finish the
whole thing I would be there into the next millennium. So I just asked them if I could
submit a third of it as my thesis and they said OK, and I thought, 'oh, maybe this would
be a way to divide up the whole project.' So, it happened sort of haphazardly.
Kirman: Did the character of Vittorio change at all while you were working on the
novels from how you originally perceived him when you were planning out the story?
The copyright of the article An Interview With Nino Ricci in Canadian Literature is owned by Paula E. Kirman. Permission to republish An Interview With Nino Ricci in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.
