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Overlooked for the Giller short-list, thank goodness Nino Ricci was nominated for a Governor General`s Award this week for his excellent book, The Origin of Species. In my estimation it`s his best book since his first, Lives of the Saints and I said as much in a review for the Ottawa Citizen last month. Unfortunately the review isn`t available online so the following is the unedited version that is sitting in my documents on my computer. I`m posting it so readers of my blog who trust my literary judgement, as I hope you do by now, will consider reading this book. I don`t know the man personally, though I have met him, and I don`t know much about the writing of the book - since I try not to read too much available bumpf before I write a review - but there is an emotional quality to it, something behind it that propels it. Whatever that is has made it somehow seem like a BIG book for him. I could be wrong. It`s just a feeling.

Reviews are funny things. If you love the book, you try hard not to be too glowing so as to maintain your critical distance. If you dislike the book, you cling to the best parts of it so as to not sound too negative because, in the end, beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Just because I love or hate something - no matter how many books I`ve read and reviewed, doesn`t mean you shouldn`t pick it up.

Sometimes the reading and writing is tedious, other times it`s joyful. This time it was the latter.

Here`s what I thought of the book:

In an essay on his reading habits in YorkU, the magazine of his Toronto alma mater, Nino Ricci writes: “While it’s true that whatever little I know about writing I’m still in the process of learning, what I know about reading I’d already learned by the first grade: read what transports you. If I had never been transported, it would never have occurred to me to write. That is what I try to remember every day when I put my pen to the page.”

Those are humble words coming from one of this country’s most celebrated writers. Even more so when you consider the transportive quality of his newest book, The Origin of Species, already long-listed for this year’s Giller Prize. Like Testament, Ricci’s previous book, the story has its roots in history; this time with evolutionary theorist Charles Darwin as its inspiration. Set in 1980s Montreal, amid Canada’s unity crisis, Ricci weaves a tale in three distinctive, compelling parts that show the evolution of Alex Fratarcangeli, a graduate student who possesses a curious mixture of self loathing and haughtiness. Preoccupied with the past, in denial of his present circumstances, Alex struggles with the distracting inertia that delays completion of his dissertation, and the final step into the life of his youthful promise. Even at a hefty 472 pages Ricci packs a lot in. Though it is chock-full of intellectual ruminations, literary, political and historical references, and scientific explanations, it’s a compelling page turning. It’s also rife with humour and relatable experiences about the way we, as flawed but striving humans try to eek out our lives. Fittingly, as per the title and its inspiration, it’s about how we adapt and survive.

The story opens with Alex’s introduction to Esther, a fellow Concordia student who lives in his building. Not socially invested in chit chat with strangers, Alex is surprised at how immediately he is drawn into her life. He responds to her bubbly open-mindedness, though she is in the mid-stages of multiple sclerosis, and she becomes a kind of talisman to him. Over the course of their friendship as her physical condition worsens, he becomes her touchstone. Their visceral connection allows him to express some of his most hidden misgivings - things he’s kept from family, friends and even his therapist.

Things such as, a lifelong discomfort and anger held against his father; sadness over the break up of his long-term girlfriend and shame about their experimental sex life that pushed past the limits of their love, a May/December fling with a Swedish divorcee that results in the surprising news of a son, a surreal and ultimately tragic adventure with a British Darwinian researcher in the Galapagos Islands, his disdain/admiration for the refugee immigrants to whom he teaches English.

All the while Alex is trying to finish his nagging dissertation within which he is attempting to link art with science, narrative theory with evolutionary theory. This is exacerbated by the fact that it’s a project that is no small feat and which has no precedence that he can uncover. The too familiar relationship he develops with his tutor, Jiri, adds another layer of distraction, frustration and near-defeat. Throughout the story there are plenty of little surprises; Alex’s entertaining inner dialogues with Peter Gzowski, his CanLit rant with Margaret Atwood as its star, his habitual stroll past Pierre Elliot Trudeau’s home – not out of the ordinary for a son of immigrants, a reverential trek up to the Sainte-Jean-Baptiste cross only to piss at its foot, and other amusing Canadianisms that entrench this story firmly in a decade that is too easy to forget by half.

With The Origin of Species, Ricci offers up any number of entry points; history, literature, science, sexual exploration, Canada’s two solitudes, the political activism of Quebec immigrants, magic realism in the Galapagos adventure chapters. By far the story that resonates however is the emotional journey of an accidental father who, against his best efforts, allows his son to enter first into his consciousness, then his imagination and finally his heart.

“There were many pictures. These Alex kept in a separate stack: one day he would mount them, pin them with magnets to his fridge for all to see or paste them to the walls, laminate them, make a book, blow them up poster-size or paint them on the ceiling. I have a son. For now, though, the matter still felt too private. For now, it was his own.”

Of course the twin character to Alex in The Origin of Species is Charles Darwin, himself a floundering and reluctant genius who travelled the world on his trusty Beagle collecting data and looking for complicated scientific patterns. For the longest time he didn’t know that the finches he studied in the Galapagos held the key to what would become his theory of evolution, securing his place in the annals of science and history. As Alex comes to understand, sometimes we hold the answer long after we start asking the questions. The hardest part is clearing out the emotional muck to get to the prize.

An entertaining and emotionally rewarding read, this book will transport Nino Ricci to further heights of literary stardom and could well overtake his first, Lives of the Saints, as his signature work. Much like the original Origin of Species did to the career and life of Charles Darwin.