Books: The Sins Of The Old World

If Toronto has become one of the world’s literary capitals, that is in large part because so many of its contemporary writers have imported the rites and superstitions of their Old Worlds into the wide-open promise of the New–Rohinton Mistry re-creating Bombay of the 1970s in his heartrending A Fine Balance, Anne Michaels piecing together fragments from the Holocaust in her luminous Fugitive Pieces, Michael Ondaatje staging a dance of cosmopolitans in The English Patient. Nino Ricci belongs very much in their company, Italian division. Though his protagonists live in clean, secular Toronto, they carry around the primal ties and cycles of guilt that belong to the other side of the globe and leave them in half shadow. They have left their past behind, but it has not left them.

This drumming ancestral cadence, after building slowly in Ricci’s two earlier, related novels (including the prize-winning The Book of Saints), comes to a mist-wreathed climax in Where She Has Gone (Picador USA; 325 pages; $25). Here the sins of the Old World seep across the New as blood across a sheet. Vittorio Innocente–the name itself doesn’t travel light–lives unanchored in a Toronto of immigrants, with nothing, as he says, but his freedom. Driving around town in his late father’s Oldsmobile, he cannot slough off his mother’s infidelity and the out-of-wedlock child she bore, while dying herself, on the passage to America.

When the product of that fatal union, Rita, comes to Toronto to study, Victor (as he’s now known) finds himself drawn to her by feelings not entirely fraternal. When a touch goes too far, he falls through the false bottom of the civilized world and into something atavistic. The outlines of classical tragedy have come to shiny, multicultural Yonge Street.

And as, in its second half, the book returns to the sleepy Italian village where all this started, Vittorio finds that his past has been replaced–or refuses to conform to his memories. In the company of ancient aunts and local old-wives’ tales, answers don’t come as easily as in novels. “That’s the funny thing about family,” a character says. “You spend all your life trying to get away from them, and then they’re all you’ve got.”

Miraculously fluid and well-shaped, the narrative unspools like a wavering dream. Reality, for Ricci, is a blurred photograph torn at the edges (as is the title–you can finish the book without knowing whom “she” refers to, let alone where she has gone). Heavy with the pressure of the unspoken, yet vividly immediate, this tale of detonations proceeds like the fishing boats we see at the end, taking off into a “moon-crusted sea,” with bonfires behind them on shore, a “strange moonlit flotilla like some whispered night-time setting out for the beyond.”

Some may find this too much of a mystification, but for those who surrender to the spell, Ricci has spun out a delicate and soulful novel, tiptoeing around silences and respecting those secrets that are guessed at, as well as those that are best left untouched.

–By Pico Iyer