About the Author: Nino Ricci was born in 1959 in Leamington, Ontario to parents from the Molise region of Italy. He taught English language and literature at a secondary school in Nigeria, under the auspices of CUSO, and traveled through Africa and Europe. He also taught Creative Writing and Canadian Literature at Concordia University. His first novel, Lives of the Saints, was a bestseller and won the Governor General's Award, the Smith Books/Books in Canada First Novel Award, and the F.G. Bressani Prize among others . The second and third novels in the trilogy are the acclaimed In a Glass House and Where She Has Gone. A past president of PEN Canada, Nino lives in Toronto.

One usually begins the review of a book by telling a bit of the story and then progressing from “A” to “B”: how the story was told, the merits of the writing itself and the review’s take on the book. And, one usually starts at the beginning. But it was the ending, the final pages of Nino Ricci’s Testament that gripped me most, even though I knew the ending before cracking the book’s spine.

Testament, of course, is Ricci’s fictional account of the life of Jesus as seem from the perspective of four people who knew him: Yihuda of Qiryat (Judas), Miryam of Migdal (Mary Magdalen), Miryam, his mother, Mary, and Simon of Gergesa, the shepherd who recounts the actual crucifixion.

Once again, Nino Ricci’s exquisite prose draws the reader into the events of the story he is telling. He is, as always, precise and acute with language. Reading the final pages of Testament was like taking part in a holy day procession of any religious denomination. In this case, it would be the Good Friday Stations of the Cross reenacted yearly by pious Catholics all over the world, some of whom actually literally crucify themselves in gruesome mimicry if the original event. One flinches as one reads: “…and then his arms were stretched out along the cross beam with a soldier holding each and the spikes were nailed in at the wrists. The first blow was the one that got a scream but it was also the easiest, since it was only flesh to pass through. Then there were just the grunts of swallowed pain and the thump of the nails sinking into the wood.”

Ricci has divided his version of the story into four Books just like the Gospels. Stylistically, he weaves together and merges the events of the story from four points of view so that we are always left wondering and questioning what is true and factual, and what has been embellished, exaggerated, misinterpreted or misunderstood. Each of the four story tellers, for instance, talk about the many “miracles” attributed to Jesus, such as raising Lazarus from the dead but, as we look at the story from the various points of view, we begin to understand that appearances are not always what they seem, and stories are usually and naturally transformed by the telling and the teller. (Incidentally, the Lazarus story is reminiscent of Ricci’s handling of an apparent death in the novel In A Glass House. In that case, it was Rita’s dog who was wrongly presumed dead.) This technique makes the reader question and doubt every story ever heard, not just the bible stories retold here. This great contradiction to the teachings of the institution of Christianity is one of the ironies the reader must deal with. Are we not being asked to examine the status quo as Jesus himself did?

The novel is anti-establishment, in this sense, every bit as much as Jesus was in his day. Here was a man who dared question tradition, who accepted women for who they were, and not for their sexuality and slave-like position in that society, although rumors plagued him on this account, and who saw beyond the grotesquely diseased and disfigured bodies of the lepers and into their inner beings. As far as the authorities of the day were concerned, he did everything he wasn’t supposed to do. Ricci seems to have done the same and will no doubt by castigated by some for taking such liberties, which is unfortunate since all he is asking the reader to do is examine what we are told.

There are constant, running themes in this book which some readers will find comforting and others sacrilegious or disturbing. Although there is no question Ricci’s version of events and the nature of this man we know as Jesus have rightfully captivated millions for centuries, there is no concrete statement with respect to his being the Son of God. He is, however, an extraordinary person with unexplainable powers.

Another central theme in Testament is marginality. This Jesus is himself marginal in that he is the bastard son of Mary. According to this story, Mary was violated by a Roman after Mary’s father unwittingly put her in harm’s way by giving the man access to the young woman. Marginality, therefore, is critical to this Jesus, not only because of his own condition, but also because he takes up the cause of all those considered outcasts such as the sick and the poor. This Jesus is both human and humane and perhaps Ricci wanted to express this by making him the bastard son of Mary.

Another recurrent theme is the view of this Jesus as a door to a state of unparalled justice and peace where people are judged by their internal qualities and not the particular circumstances of their external appearance or position. Time and again, we read of this man who seems to be beckoning people to enter this new world. Judas sums up his story saying, “ But there was in Yeshua (Jesus) that quality that made one feel there was something, still, some bit of hope, some secret he might reveal that would help make the world over. Tell me your secret, I had wanted to say to him, tell me, make me knew. And even now, though I had left him, I often saw him beckoning before me as towards a doorway he would have had me pass through, from darkness to light.”

Mary, his mother, too decribes it this way after meeting Miryam of Migdal as they both wait for news of Jesus who has been taken captive: “…when she spoke of my son e wonder I heard in her voice was not so different from what I myself had felt, that sense of a doorway Yeshua stood before, to some new understanding. Except that she had passed through it, and saw things in a different light, and who was I to say that the miracle she had witnessed had not occurred, for those who has eyes to see it.” This, I think, is what Ricci is asking us to do, though some will consider it sacrilegious.

Testament is explosive in every sense. The writing launches the reader into a foreign world infused with immorality and degradation, which ironically is not much different from our own. Is this too, I wonder, something else Ricci is asking us to examine?

The shattering of the conventional story will be controversial, but Ricci would be well aware of that. After all, was not Yeshua so controversial in his time that the ruling agents saw no choice but to crucify the man? How ironic that their act, meant to destroy a man and a way of thinking, accomplished just the opposite.

Testament, however, must be judged as a work of fiction and Ricci, the novelist, has every right to spin his story his way. He is not asking us to swear on a stack of Testaments that this is the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth. He is just telling the story his way.

Marisa de Franceschi

From Kirkus Reviews 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.

The Book of Saints

A bestseller in his native Canada, Ricci's first novel concerns the highly superstitious ways of a small Italian community in 1960

"Il fratello italiano", ideale capitolo conclusivo della trilogia autobiografica iniziata con "Vite dei santi", che ha rivelato il talento narrativo dell'italocanadese Nino Ricci, è la storia del ritorno in patria di Vittorio Innocente. Il romanzo inizia a Toronto, dove Vittorio - che ora si chiama Victor - ritrova Rita, la sorella nata da una relazione adulterina della madre. I due, cresciuti solitari nella cupa famiglia del padre, un contadino emigrato in Canada negli anni Cinquanta, si avvicinano l'uno all'altra nel tentativo di creare un rapporto fraterno che non hanno mai avuto e di mettere insieme quello che resta di una famiglia. Il sentimento che li unirà, invece, sarà più complesso, e segnerà drammaticamente soprattutto Vittorio. Rita allora si allontana da Toronto e Vittorio, rimasto nuovamente solo, decide di tornare, dopo vent'anni, a Valle del Sole, al punto di partenza. Ma nel paese più niente corrisponde all'immagine che per tanti anni si era portato dietro. Soprattutto, gli sembra impossibile che un luogo così comune, quell'"ammasso mezzo diroccato di case attaccate alla montagna", possa essere il luogo in cui sono avvenuti i fatti per lui così memorabili della sua infanzia. Il passato è finito per sempre, e Vittorio lascia il paese per non tornarvi mai più.

Frank Lentricchia is Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of Literature at Duke University and author of such books as After the New Criticism, Critical Terms for Literary Study, Introducing Don DeLillo, and Ariel and the Police. He is also the author of a memoir, The Edge of Night, and several works of fiction, including the novels Johnny Critelli, The Knifemen, and The Music of the Inferno. About the Author Frank Lentricchia is Katherine Everett Gilbert Professor of Literature at Duke University and author of such books as After the New Criticism, Critical Terms for Literary Study, Introducing Don DeLillo, and Ariel and the Police. He is also the author of a memoir, The Edge of Night, and several works of fiction, including the novels Johnny Critelli, The Knifemen, and The Music of the Inferno.

Dissent from the Homeland:
Essays After September 11

Book Description: Dissent from the Homeland begins a new evaluation of how Americans think about September 11, 2001 and its aftermath. In this special issue well-known writers and scholars from across the humanities and social sciences take a critical look at U.S. domestic and foreign policies—past and present—as well as the recent surge of patriotism. These dissenting voices provide a thought-provoking alternative to the apparently overwhelming public approval of the U.S. military response to the September 11 attacks. Addressing such questions as why the Middle East harbors a deep-seated hatred for the U.S., the contributors refuse to settle for the easy answers preferred by the mass media. "Thoughts in the Presence of Fear" urges Americans away from the pitfall of national self-righteousness toward an active peaceableness—an alert, informed, practiced state of being—deeply contrary to both passivity and war. Another essay argues that the U.S. drive to win the Cold War made the nation more like its enemies, leading the government to support ruthless anti-Communist tyrants such as Mobutu, Suharto, and Pinochet. "Groundzeroland" offers a sharp commentary on the power of American consumer culture to absorb the devastation and loss of life by transforming the attack sites into patriotic tourist attractions. James Nachtwey’s photo essay provides a visual document of the devastation of the attacks.