Where She Has Gone

Overall, it is possible to categorize Ricci's novel as an account of a young Italian-Canadian undergoing a severe identity crisis. The main protagonist of Ricci's novel, Victor, has returned to Toronto from a tour of duty as a teacher in a country in Africa, and is quite unsure of how to structure his future.. Ricci deftly introduces Victor and two other main characters in the novel: his half sister, Rita, and a young woman, Elena, with whom Rita has shared a major portion of her life. Rita was born to Victor's mother, who had become pregnant while her husband, Victor's father, had been in Canada working to accumulate the funds that would allow him to bring his wife to Canada. Their mother had delivered Rita while on the ship, in passage to Canada. Following the delivery, their mother died as a result of complications of the birth. An early paragraph gathers together many of the strands that provide the thrust of the narrative: "There was also the codicil to his [their father, who had committed suicide] will that I hadn't told her about, his wish that I use my inheritance to help provide for her if she should need me to. He had neither fathered Rita nor been a father to her, had never really forgiven her for the betrayal she was the product of; but he'd carried the guilt of her to the grave. I ought to have brought the matter up now and made an end of it" (p. 4). Though their father could not completely abrogate responsibility for the daughter of his wife, his treatment of the girl led to the intercession of a social service agency that placed Rita into the home of a family that also had adopted Elena. Their father's guilt apparently led to his having laid a heavy charge on Victor. His father had,. essentially, asked Victor to act as a channel through which some fatherly obligations to Rita might be honored. Victor's breech of the charge, then, added a deep dimension to Victor's efforts to develop a mature self identity. Eventually, Victor's efforts to develop a mature and satisfying identity led him to return to Italy, after an interval of twenty years since he had departed, with his then-pregnant mother, from the small town in Molise. He seems to have been driven by a vague desire to reveal the identity of the person with whom his mother had violated the traditional role of Southern Italian wife by having engaged in the ill-fated tryst. The venture proved unsatisfactory. Among other revelations, Victor determined that he could not build an identity on the base of his family's history of connections to the people of the small town where he had spent his first years with his mother. Indeed, reactions to his mother's long ago failure to meet traditional expectations still played a part in his relationships with remnants of his family. At the end of the novel, Victor's efforts to put an end to the turmoil of his search for an identity allow him to reach a half reasonable resolution, desp

i had originally that that this book would have contained much of the same essence that "live of the saints" had, but i was blown away by the way nino ricci ended Victor's story in "WSHG".the bizarre fascination with his sister, and longing for a relation with her was ill mannered/nasty , but yet i still continued to finish the novel. the only tick i had about this novel was the ending. it seemed to much of an easy way out, and nino ricci should have thought of sumthing drastic happening to Victor?Vittorio

The atmosphere Ricci creates in WHERE SHE HAS GONE is enveloped in sorrow. As the story of Victor and Rita unfolds, the deep melancholy grows.Victor and Rita are half-siblings; Rita the product of their mother's affair in her small Italian town while her husband (Victor's father) was in Canada setting the foundation for a new life for his family Over the course of the first two books in the trilogy, their mother dies after giving birth to Rita on the ocean liner bringing them to Canada, and Victor and Rita are raised together for a few years on his father's farm, until Rita is adopted by a nearby couple.The siblings grow up and grow apart, until the opening of WHERE SHE HAS GONE, where they meet again in Toronto-Victor as a grad student/writer and Rita just starting university. The relationship they develop as adults is complicated and sad, but compelling. Ricci's language is distilled to a very simple, effective style, that suits the mood he creates beautifully.All three books in the trilogy are highly recommended, but it's not necessary to have read the first two to be moved by the last (though I'm sure after reading WHERE SHE HAS GONE you'll want to).

I was not prepared for this book. I was totally side-swiped for days after its conclusion. Mr. Ricci is a fabulous writer, and I was quite unprepared for the emotions I am feeling still. Mr. Ricci has definitely replaced Graham Greene as my favorite author of fiction, and I am now reading the first two books in this trilogy. Hopefully there will be many more!Interestingly, I live in Toronto, not far from Victor's apartment. The location and building with the fire escape are just as described in the book.

This is the first Ricci book I've read and I liked it so much that I decided to read 'Lives of the Saints' and 'In A Glass House' as well. It's the final book of Ricci's trilogy, I liked it heaps except the final part of it. I was deeply moved by the novel and I highly recommend it. Nino Ricci has made himself one of my favourite authors. I'm curious if he is going to write something else soon.