An Interview With Nino Ricci

Ricci: He did. When I started planning the story it was going to be a sort of farce. Farce maybe isn't the right word -- sort of a satiric romp. Initially, I was very influenced at that point by Gravity's Rainbow by Thomas Pincheon which is this sort of encyclopedic novel full of conspiracy theories. That was my original intention for this trilogy, that the narrator, Vittorio, was actually someone who was delusional and believed that he was the second coming of Christ, and that there were various details sprinkled throughout the trilogy to lend credence to this belief. That all sort of fell by the wayside [laughing].

Kirman: Did this major change in your plans surprise you, or was that just the natural evolution of the story?

Ricci: It was *the* evolution that occurred. I think a lot of that stuff wasn't very well thought out or didn't have enough depth to it. I was working with a professor at Concordia and he would sort of weed out the over-the-top stuff that there was quite a bit of in the earlier manuscripts. Not that he would tell me to remove it, but he would ask me probing questions about where I was going with it and what I intended by it. Eventually I felt it wasn't really working, so I whittled the story down to its essential.

Kirman: When Lives of the Saints appeared in novel form and it did so well, what did you attribute to that success?

Ricci: I don't know. It's very hard to analyze why some books do well and others don't. It's some kind of ephemeral thing that doesn't necessarily have to do with the quality of the writing, per se. It may just be tapping into a particular kind of story that resonates with people for whatever reason. I think in the case of Lives of the Saints, a lot of people identified with the mother in the story, both women and men. A lot of people were attracted to the locale because it was slightly exotic. A lot of people were attracted to the child's point of view which is often a very winning kind of way to tell a story because children are so cute. They have such a different way of looking at the world, such a fresh way of looking at the world and I think all of us long in the core of our beings for a return to some state of innocence, whether we associate that with childhood or whatever, but childhood seems the clearest

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