Where She Has Gone [Hardcover]

Where She Has Gone, Nino Ricci's third novel, is the final volume of the trilogy inaugurated by the best-selling The Lives of the Saints (winner of the Governor General's Award, among many other accolades) and In a Glass House. While In a Glass House is an expansive novel, rolling through two decades of Victor Innocente's life, Where She Has Gone is full of speed, passion, and intimacy, covering a few short months of transgression and doubt. Following the death of his father, Victor, a worldly, slightly ascetic graduate student, rebuilds his relationship with Rita, his half-sister, who has just begun an undergraduate degree at the University of Toronto. Victor's relationship with Rita was never simple, but now it becomes fraught with entirely new troubles: an unspoken sexual tension begins to develop between them, and its intensity refuses to abate. Their reeling, half-understood emotions send them, separately, back to Valle del Sole in Italy, their ancestral village, to confront the mysteries of their family and the weight of their culture.

Ricci handles this incestuous relationship amazingly well, making it both believable and entirely sympathetic. Where She Has Gone does slow a little when Rita removes herself from the action, leaving Victor alone with his obsessions, but it never entirely loses its momentum. Those who are really interested in Ricci's work should begin with The Lives of the Saints, but Where She Has Gone is a compelling, sensuous novel, well worth reading in its own right. --Jack Illingworth --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

The search for family, truth and identity drives the final installment of Ricci's trilogy (after The Book of Saints and In a Glass House) about an Italian family transplanted to Canada. Italian-born Toronto grad student Vittorio Innocente narrates his quest to trace the mystery regarding his family and his last memory of his mother. As we learned in earlier novels, and as we see again in flashbacks on a transatlantic ship he's traveling on to meet his father in Canada, Victor watched as his mother died while giving birth to a fair-complected, blue-eyed girl. The girl, Rita, was the child of another man, a stranger to the small Italian village. Victor's father, to forgive his wife's infidelity, gives Rita to an adoptive family while raising Victor himself. This novel begins after Victor's father's death, when Victor reacquaints himself with Rita, who has entered college in Toronto. The siblings gradually overcome their awkwardness toward each other and, in the process, become closer than they should. Their relationship falters and Rita takes off to Europe with an older Germanic man who Victor suspects may be her real father. In emotional turmoil, Victor leaves Toronto for Italy with the hopes of piecing together his family's history. In his boyhood village, Victor is reintroduced to aunts, uncles, cousins and a boyhood friend, and with each comes a rush of new memories. When the siblings finally meet, they realize that the ghost of their past will be a constant presence. Ricci's poetic prose and fluid plot create a tense and beautiful story whose sad ironies achieve resolution in a haunting conclusion. (July) FYI: Ricci is a former president of PEN Canada. The Book of Saints won the Governor General's Award for fiction .
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Upon returning to Toronto after teaching in Africa, Vittorio Innocente reconnects with his half-sister Rita, who is in her first year of college. Rita's mother died in childbirth aboard a ship for Canada, and Rita, resented by Vittorio's father, grew up in a foster home. Vittorio, big brother and surrogate father, also finds himself attracted to Rita, creating tensions in their relationship; when she leaves for Europe with John, a man old enough to be her father, Vittorio follows to meet her in the Italian village where he lived with his mother. This third volume of a trilogy that began with The Book of Saints (LJ 5/1/91) can be read alone, as the events of the previous books are smoothly integrated into the narrative, but it is far more powerful as a concluding volume. Ricci explores the immigrant's ambivalence concerning home and identity in a sensitive, compelling fashion. Recommended for public libraries.?Joshua Cohen, Mid-Hudson Lib. System, Poughkeepsie, NY
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

This beautifully written, quietly moving story impressively completes Italian-Canadian novelist Ricci's autobiographical trilogy (The Book of Saints, 1991; In a Glass House, 1995). In those previous installments, Ricci chronicled, in painstaking and often painful detail, the childhood and youth in the Italian village of Valle del Sole of Vittorio Innocente; his passage to North America with his mother Cristina, a disgraced adulteress who died while en route to a promised reconciliation with her betrayed husband; and the difficult adaptation to life in Toronto made by ``Victor'' (his name now Anglicized), his embittered and exhausted father, and Victor's half-sister Rita, Cristina's bastard daughter, who was adopted and raised by a neighbor family. This final volume brings Rita and Victor together, when his father commits suicide and her adoptive family separates. Their unexpected intimacy propels Victor into a rigorous self-examinationand a return to his homeland in hopes of learning the truth about his mother's ``sin'' and the identity of Rita's father (about which he already has suspicions). The shocks that are in store for him effectively estrange Victor/Vittorio as much from his own identity as from those he feels compelled to love, but this skillfully plotted story nevertheless ends on a credibly hopeful note, following a powerful climax in Londonmidway between its protagonist's two ``worlds.'' Ricci, a former president of PEN Canada, is 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. And his use of symbolism is especially deft (the presence of antiquarian relics scattered around Villa del Sole, for example, subtly mocks the elusiveness of Victor's own buried past). An extended work that rivals Pat Barker's much better known WWI trilogy, and a saga of the immigrant experience that is unrivaled in English (and, very likely, Italian). -- Copyright ©1998, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

“A magnificent novel…beautifully balanced, expertly paced, and executed in a prose that’s so sure, so smooth in its operations, so expressive, that it might be said to thrum with a natural life.”
–Quill & Quire (starred review)

“Ricci has spun out a delicate and soulful novel…miraculously fluid and well-shaped, the narrative unspools like a wavering dream.”
–Time

“Nino Ricci confirms the wide breadth, dizzying heights and splendorous depths of his talent for telling a spellbinding tale.…”
–Toronto Star

“Where She Has Gone emerges as an accomplished and moving work.”
–New York Times Book Review

“One of the grand achievements of contemporary Canadian writing.…”
–Vancouver Sun

Set in Toronto and Italy, this powerful sequel to In a Glass House explores the sometimes forbidden aspect of desire and one’s longing for what is unrecoverable. Victor Innocente remeets his half-sister in Toronto, shortly after his father’s death. Uneasy with their new proximity in each other’s lives, they are at first restrained. But gradually what is unspoken between them comes closer to the surface, setting in motion a course of events that will take Victor back to Valle del Sole in Italy, the place of his birth. It is there, where the story had its strange beginning twenty years earlier, that he confronts his past, its secrets and its revelations. Poignant, gripping, and written in luminous, highly charged prose, Where She Has Gone is an unforgettable novel – for its vivid portrayal of character and place, and for its extraordinarily moving encounter with the past.

"Delicate and soulful...unspools like a wavering dream." --Pico Iyer, Time

"Assured...an accomplished and moving work." --The New York Times Book Review

"Sparkling...well written and moving...a brilliant study of the way shame is passed down through generations." --Roland Merullo, The Boston Globe

"Beautifully written, quietly moving...a saga of the immigrant experience that is unrivaled in English." --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

“A magnificent novel…beautifully balanced, expertly paced, and executed in a prose that’s so sure, so smooth in its operations, so expressive, that it might be said to thrum with a natural life.”
–Quill & Quire (starred review)

“Ricci has spun out a delicate and soulful novel…miraculously fluid and well-shaped, the narrative unspools like a wavering dream.”
–Time

“Nino Ricci confirms the wide breadth, dizzying heights and splendorous depths of his talent for telling a spellbinding tale.…”
–Toronto Star

“Where She Has Gone emerges as an accomplished and moving work.”
–New York Times Book Review

“One of the grand achievements of contemporary Canadian writing.…”
–Vancouver Sun

Nino Ricci was born in Leamington, Ontario, in 1959. His first novel, Lives of the Saints (1990), won the Governor General’s Award for Fiction, the SmithBooks/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the F.G. Bressani Prize. The novel was also a long-time national bestseller, and was followed by the highly acclaimed In a Glass House (1993) and Where She Has Gone (1997), which was shortlisted for the prestigious Giller Prize. His most recent novel is Testament (2002). Ricci holds a B.A. from York University and an M.A. from Concordia University. He is a past president of PEN Canada.

Nino Ricci lives in Toronto.