NINO Ricci's career has been unique by any standard. He has published one novel, Lives of the Saints (Cormorant), which starts with a woman being bitten by a snake in a stable in a remote Italian village and ends with the young narrator arriving in Canada. It is the first volume of a projected trilogy. In Canada Lives of the Saints won the 1991 Governor General's Award for Fiction and the W. H. Smith/Books in Canada First Novel Award; in Britain it won the Betty Trask Award and the Winnifred Holtby Prize. The novel has also been widely translated. At the time of this interview, it had been on the Globe and Mail's best-seller list for 72 weeks. With just one novel published, the 33-year-old Ricci is already a significant voice in Canadian fiction.

This interview with John Doyle took place in late September, at Ricci's home in downtown Toronto. In person, Ricci is amiable -- almost every answer presented here is punctuated by laughter -- but a little wary of making statements on the broader issues of Canadian culture. As a young Canadian writer with an Italian heritage -- and engaged in a long fictional chronicle of immigration -- the issues that invigorate discussion with him are ethnicity and the dread of being labelled a hyphenated Canadian writer.

BiC: You've just come back from Sweden and Denmark, where Lives of the Saints has been published in translation. What was the reaction to the book over there?

Nino Ricci: It was hard to tell because I couldn't read the reviews.

BiC: Come on, you had some sense of how it was being received.

Ricci: All right. When I was being interviewed, I did notice familiar questions being asked. The main issue seemed to be that the book is set in such a different world, both in time and place. That was something that Canadian readers and reviewers found striking, so the reaction over there was similar. From what I could tell, anyway.

BiC: Does that bother you -- that people think the setting for the novel is so strange and exotic?

Ricci: I certainly didn't write it that way. Of course there were elements that appealed to me because they were so different from my own experience. But the real intent, at some level, was not to exoticize that world but to normalize it. In other words I tried to arrive at a point where, despite the obvious exotic elements, there is much that's very familiar and would be true in any small community. A reason I set the book in Italy was to be able to enter fully into the lives of the characters. One of the dangers of setting a book that deals with Italian immigrants in Canada is that there's already a mind-set through which the characters would be viewed. They would simply he immigrants and "ethnics." I've got a lot of problems with the way "ethnic" is used. A way around that was to start in a world where the term "ethnic" doesn't exist and the characters are simply there. Then when you follow them to Canada you're inside their view of the world, rather than seeing them from the outside.

BiC: You live in the heart of Toronto -- do you like living and working in the core of the city, with all its noise and, sometimes, nastier side?

Ricci: Sure I do. I feel more at home here than in Rosedale or Forest Hill. Of course, I tend to exoticize too. Kensington Market still seems very exotic and foreign to me. Anyway, rents are cheaper here. That's important.

BiC: flow long were you working on Lives of the Saints!

Ricci: I started in the spring of 1985. It actually began as part of my M.A. at Concordia. At that point I was planning to do a single' novel that Would cover the whole story of the trilogy. The draft took about a year, but then I went back and divided it up. Partly because I wanted to graduate and I didn't want to complete a 1,000-page novel to get my degree. But also because there were natural division points in it. I went back and spent another year and a half on what became Lives of the Saints. Then, after a gap, I spent about another four months on it.

BiC: Was cutting the material down to one novel a painful process for you?

Ricci: It was a lot easier than I thought it would be. Because I wanted, the Cutting became a creative endeavour. Every page that was cut became a victory, although they were good pages. A problem was that the first 70 pages were introductory and the story didn't begin until page 72. At one point it was very difficult for me to accept that this was not the way to start the novel. I did a workshop with Clark Blaise in my last year at Concordia and he gave us an essay of his called "To Begin To Begin." One of the things that taught me was that a whole story should somehow be captured in the first line. I took that as a sort of guiding principle for the structure of the book and I found that it was a true principle.

BiC: A sense of loss is very much part of the so-called immigrant novel -- it's in your novel explicitly in the death of the mother just before the narrator reaches Canada. Given that this is really a country of immigrants, is that sense of loss an unacknowledged part of Canadian culture?

Ricci: I don't know. I suppose what I really mean is that I'm not willing to make a sweeping statement to you about Canadian culture. But I do agree that it hasn't been dealt with enough, because loss is a key part of the immigrant experience. I did a research project that involved talking to a lot of Italian immigrants, and a sense of loss came strongly from many of them. With some it was verbalized easily. With others it was expressed as "I don't want to think about that any more." I do think that a fundamental crisis of identity occurs when you leave one Culture for another. It's just wrong to view that experience as "nostalgia." That simply trivializes the experience, and perhaps in Canada there has been a tendency to trivialize it.

BiC: You've written, in an academic vein, about post-structuralist theories of feminist writing and "the feminine" in fiction. Did your knowledge of theory influence you when writing a novel with such a strong female central character?

Ricci: I thought that essay had been buried and lost! Yes, I was influenced by theory and for a while I took up that language because it seemed to offer a sort of privileged access to literature. It also seemed to have a political basis, but now I think it simply excludes those who haven't mastered the language of theory. The answer to your question is Yes and No.

BiC: How do you react to the conviction that male writers can't and shouldn't write about women?

Ricci: Well, remember that I don't even go inside the female character's head. Seriously, basically I disagree. Writers have always made leaps of the imagination and you can't stop them doing that. Of course, all of this arose because of very real problems. Certain groups, Natives for instance, have been misrepresented and maybe writers have to be reminded about respect and competence. Still, I disagree with the idea of not allowing writers to write about the "other." If you think you can do it competently, go ahead. If you fail, you're just a bad writer.

BiC: Your own writing career began at York University, where you took creative-writing courses. Did you enjoy university and those courses that attempted to teach you how to write?

Ricci: I did at the time. York was a god-awful campus. I was happy with the education I got there, but I was coming from a situation where I knew nothing.

BiC: Your first creative-writing course was with W. 0. Mitchell.

Ricci: I was only in it for a few weeks. After my first submission he asked me to leave, so I did.

BiC: Back then, were you writing a lot?

Ricci: I didn't do a great deal of writing when I was there. It was always the thing I meant to do but never seemed to get around to. One of the reasons that I took a poetry workshop later on was that I thought it took less time to write a poem than a short story. At one level, I suppose I believed it was more useful to me to study Shakespeare than read the bad short stories of my peers. In creative writing we were encouraged to do something in every genre, so we really did very little of anything.

BiC: You've said that when you were younger you wanted to separate yourself from your heritage and be British. Do you know why you felt like that?

Ricci: I've tried to trace this back and I think it must have been because of some British movies I saw on the only Canadian TV channel we could pick up in Leamington, Ontario.

BiC: Does this mean that you were drawn toward British writing as a model for your own work?

Ricci: Not really. I was only eight or nine years old when this feeling came over me. I can't say I was very familiar with British literature at that stage.

BiC: Tell me about Leamington. Obviously it inspired the description of Canada as "the Sun Parlour" in Lives of the Saints, but what image of it do you personally carry with you?

Ricci: Yes, it has a more southern feel to it than most of Ontario and most of Canada. I suppose it's a microcosm of Canada because it has Italian, Hungarian, Ukrainian, German, and other immigrant communities there. Not that I saw it as a microcosm when I was a kid. Actually, when I was a kid I considered it nowhere and a place to leave very quickly.

BiC: All right, let's leave Leamington behind. There's a political dimension to Lives of the Saints -fascism, communism, and the use of power are part of the story -- yet that political aspect has been ignored by reviewers here in Canada in favour of an emphasis on the mythological. Do you think the novel has been properly understood?

Ricci: Yes, politics plays a part in the story, but I don't want anyone to think that I'm an expert on Italian politics in the period covered in the story. Let's just say that I have been surprised by what some of the readers and reviewers have taken from the book. When it was first published, and I read some of the reaction to it, my own feeling was "So that's what I was writing about!" I don't think that's an uncommon feeling, but I have to wonder what some readers are going to make of my next book.

BiC: What can you tell me about the next volume of the trilogy?

Ricci: It will be published in the fall of'93, I hope. There will be no shocking innovation, in spite of what I've just said about readers reacting to it. It has the same narrator, Vittorio, who's in Canada now. He's with his father, who has to deal with the shame of what happened to Vittorio's mother. Then there's Vittorio's half-sister. The father has to deal with all of this.

BiC: Getting back to politics for a moment -- have you taken any part in the referendum debate?

Ricci: No.

BiC: Why not?

Ricci: I think I probably feel like most Canadians do about the issue. I've thought about it and maybe I'll spoil my ballot when the time comes. It's not that I'm not interested in politics. Like most writers I find that working alone has an effect on one's political outlook. I've been involved in some work on human rights issues and I've found that satisfying. Thats political too, isn't it?

BiC: Would it trouble you to be considered a hyphenated writer that is, an "Italian-Canadian" writer?

Ricci: I can see the usefulness of the label in terms of describing some of the tendencies of one's work. It's a sort of marker for labelling the concerns of the writer. The danger is that the writer can be viewed as someone of limited interest, constrained by concerns that would be considered germane only to an ItalianCanadian. The writer is then seen as not reaching out to deal with broader concerns and not relevant to a wider range of readers. It's not a label that I would ever apply to myself. I think of myself as a writer who happened to he born in Canada and happened to have parents who were born in Italy, and therefore my material reflects that background. But my writing won't be strictly defined by that background and certainly not limited by it.

BiC: It sounds like you've been asked that question before and you've thought a lot about the answer.

Ricci: It comes up often. Maybe too often.

BiC: Can you list some of the writers you admire -- not necessarily those who have influenced you?

Ricci: Alice Munro, Doris Lessing, Virginia Woolf, Italo Calvino, Shakespeare, and whoever wrote Beowulf.

BiC: Lives of the Saints has been on the best-seller lists for so long now that it must have drawn interest from someone who wants to turn it into a movie.

Ricci: Well, it won't be coming to a theatre near you very soon. There is someone who has an option to film all three books. I'm pleased about it because she's someone I trust. And if shes not entirely faithful to the written work, at least she'll have respect for it. I think writers just have to accept that something very different is going to emerge when a film is made of a book.

BiC: Are you interested in writing the screenplay?

Ricci: Possibly. I'm certainly attracted to the idea of writing a screenplay, simply because movies are so important in our society. On the other hand, I may be so tired of the story that I won't want anything to do with it.