The Origin of Species

by Nino Ricci

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Winner of the 2008 Governor General’s Award for Fiction

Montreal during the turbulent mid-1980s: Chernobyl has set Geiger counters thrumming across the globe, HIV/AIDS is cutting a deadly swath through the gay population worldwide, and locally, tempers are flaring over the recent codification of French as the official language of Quebec. Hiding out in a seedy apartment near campus, Alex Fratarcangeli (“Don’t worry. . . . I can’t even pronounce it myself”), an awkward, thirty-something grad student, is plagued by the sensation that his entire life is a fraud. Scarred by a distant father and a dangerous relationship with his ex Liz, and consumed by a floundering dissertation linking Darwin’s theory of evolution with the history of human narrative, Alex has come to view love and other human emotions as “evolutionary surplus, haphazard neural responses that nature had latched onto for its own insidious purposes.” When Alex receives a letter from Ingrid, the beautiful woman he knew years ago in Sweden, notifying him of the existence of his five-year-old son, he is gripped by a paralytic terror. Whenever Alex’s thoughts grow darkest, he recalls Desmond, the British professor with dubious credentials whom he met years ago in the Galapagos. Treacherous and despicable, wearing his ignominy like his rumpled jacket, Desmond nonetheless caught Alex in his thrall and led him to some life-altering truths during their weeks exploring Darwin’s islands together. It is only now that Alex can begin to comprehend these unlikely life lessons, and see a glimmer of hope shining through what he had thought was meaninglessness.

Release date: April 6, 2010

Publisher: Other Press

Print pages: 496

Sample

Somehow it was not Dr. Klein, however, with whom he wanted to discuss these things. That would have been too awkward, really, too demeaning. From there, it would have been only a short step to making incontrovertible what for most of his life he had striven to hide from the world, namely the dark den of banality and self-absorption that his mind truly was. There were the self-improvement fantasies that kept his revenge ones company–I will be more generous; I will quit smoking; I will learn Spanish; I will call home more often; I will stop plotting stupid revenge fantasies; I will become a better, more perfect person–or the embarrassing interviews he was forever conducting with himself in his head, and that probably constituted his main mode of self-presence. The interviews were particularly insidious. Alex himself could hardly believe how much of his mind-time they took up, and yet he couldn’t seem to muster whatever strength of will it might take to put an end to them.