Award-winning writer Nino Ricci takes dark look at narcolepsy in novel ‘Sleep’

By Lois Abraham, The Canadian Press

TORONTO – For Nino Ricci, imagining the last words of a novel usually inspires the story he wants to tell. His new book “Sleep” was no exception.

“What came to me first was the book’s ending — and the book’s last line really — and I thought, ‘Yeah, that seems to have resonance. Now I just have to figure out how my character ends up there,'” says Ricci, who won Governor General’s Awards for Fiction for his novels “Lives of the Saints” and “The Origin of the Species.”

“Most of my books actually work that way — that I get a final image of some sort and I can feel the feeling in that situation and then I try and unspool the story from that.”

“Sleep,” a disturbing look at a history professor’s descent into the realm of sleeplessness, starts with a near-tragedy, keeps the reader on edge throughout, and ends explosively.

David Pace has a successful career with a beautiful wife, who’s also an academic. They have a young son and a gorgeous home.

But David begins to have trouble sleeping, then falls asleep at inopportune moments. After he’s diagnosed with a sleep disorder, he increasingly relies on pharmaceuticals and engages in deviant sexual behaviour.

If Ricci’s descriptions of sleep clinics seem realistic, it’s because the author suffers from a sleep disorder diagnosed about 10 years ago.

But any other similarities with the protagonist end there, says Ricci during an interview at the office of publisher Doubleday.

“He’s a more extreme character than I am and also has more extreme interpretations than I do. We have to take his depictions with a bit of a grain of salt, but it’s all drawn from things I’ve actually been through myself and experienced first-hand,” Ricci says.

David grows increasingly jealous of his wife’s academic success and his twin brother’s amassing wealth. He alienates colleagues, has financial problems and becomes obsessed with guns.

The 56-year-old author, who has taught Canadian studies at Princeton University, says he can now “function quite normally” with narcolepsy.

“I was very worried at the outset about pumping my body full of all these chemicals, but I don’t think it’s affected my creative process. I went through trying different medications and there was one I tried where I couldn’t write,” he says.

“I would sit down and I would write a sentence and it wouldn’t seem right. I’d write it a different way and by the end I’d have 12 versions of it and I couldn’t decide which was the right one.

“It was very paralysing, as if I’d lost the big picture or a sense of esthetic judgement.”

Ricci, who has been awarded the Order of Canada, lives in Toronto with his wife and 14-year-old son. He loves watching films in his spare time.

“In another life I would have liked to be a film director, but I would never have the authority to command a film set. That’s just not my personality,” he says.

“But there’s a part of me that always wanted to go in that direction because film is so much the medium of our time.”

Ricci dedicated “Sleep” to Canadian novelist, filmmaker and musician Paul Quarrington, his close friend who died of lung cancer in 2010 at age 56.

Quarrington and his wife introduced Ricci to his wife. They had children around the same age, and the two families took holidays together.

“He knew everyone — he knew everyone in the writing world, he knew people in the music world and the film world, so all I had to do was hang out with Paul and my social life was taken care of. Just go wherever Paul went. And I knew whenever I went anywhere Paul was there, that I was kind of safe, like he was like my godfather.

“My life feels very diminished since he died.”

Follow @lois_abraham on Twitter.

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