Carmelo Militano’s latest novel is very compelling and sensual, with all the elements of a detective literary thriller and the passion of a love story, intertwined into one. Militano is the winner of both the Bressani Literary Award and the San Bernardo Poetry Prize. He is a prolific writer, educator, and radio broadcaster who lives in Winnipeg. Take some time and enjoy his wonderful new book under a winter blanket with a warm drink of your choice.
Where did the idea for this book from?
The source of this book probably has many different streams, some going back to my childhood. First, I have always enjoyed reading noir detective stories especially Raymond Chandler and Philip Kerr, the Scottish mystery writer who sets his P.I. characters in Nazi Germany or shortly before. I also like reading erotica but not the modern stuff such as 50 shades of what I call bad writing, but great sensual psychological stories such as the Story of O and the baroque Stealing Beauty trilogy. And next up is the wonderful and romantic The Alexandrian Quartet by Lawrence Durrell, a largely forgotten mid-century British writer, and some of D. H. Lawrence’s novels. So, I thought why not write a novel that combines the P.I. genre with the romantic-erotic? The other source is my fascination with New Wave French films, especially Godard and Truffaut and their focus on the intersection of art, mystery, and romantic relationships between men and women and lastly the existential hero in film and novels.
Was any part of this book hard for you to write?
A novel, a short story, a poem, even non-fiction, is hard to write broadly speaking in the sense you often begin with a lot of uncertainly about what it is you are trying to do and what you are trying to say. I rarely know much about the novel I am trying to write other than I have a character or two who I am interested in and a setting. I discover the story as I write, and by that I mean I make choices about who the characters are and the challenges or obstacles they face, which by the way, is a classic setup. If you mean hard in the sense of worry or anxiety about the story and how a reader will understand what you are doing, yes, I did think about that especially with this book. I am writing about intimacy and sexuality and I did not want the sensual passages in the book to be understood as porn so the hard bit was writing about sexuality in a real way but keeping it sensual, true, and tender and not vulgar. I wanted to be true to the lived experience and what some people have told me about over the years about their own intimate life. So, depicting sexuality realistically and sensually without either writing over the top purple romantic prose or the other direction, demeaning, sensationalist, and tasteless, was a challenge.
The novel is fast-paced and so tightly written. Was that hard to achieve?
My prose fiction and how I write was influenced by the way I started as a writer. I began my writing life as a freelance journalist for the local CBC radio station. At the same time, I had been writing poetry on and off for close to seven years. Both journalism and poetry teach you to write with brevity, clarity, and at the same time to aim to make your prose sing, a favorite expression of my then-producer at CBC radio. Poetry teaches you to write with striking crisp images. So, as a result I write condensed tight visual sentences. I would include in my own aesthetic that I do not like to read writers who ramble, although someone like Dickens, who takes forever to get to whatever he is trying to say, is fun because his details are visual.
The plot does not follow a conventional structure. It is made up of lyrical memory fragments or vignettes. Why did you structure it this way?
The New Wave film director Jean-Luc Godard once famously quipped a good story must have a beginning, middle, and an end but not necessarily in that order. The way a ‘conventional’ novel is structured (or plotted) is simply a nicety of the way fiction is conceived to work by most readers and writers and some critics. It’s there to help the reader know and understand the story. I do not think that convention is all that interesting and it lowers the mystery content of the story much in the same way a literal story makes for dull reading and writing. Lastly, in this book I decided to take a risk and ask the reader to do some of the heavy-lifting in understanding the book, although I played with ambiguity and unconventional plot in a few of my short stories in Lost Aria. I like the idea that a novel does not have to be definitive or air-tight in its conclusion and movement. I disagree that a novel can only work by cause and effect or if you like, A follows B and so on. So do many fine contemporary novelists such as John Banville. The Patina of Melancholy, as a novel works more like a poem in how it wishes to be understood and appreciated.
The main character is searching for the love of his life and, in a sense, for himself. Was the idea of searching important to you while writing this novel?
The search in the novel adds to the tension and mystery in the story. It is there to keep the reader involved and to turn the page and the next page. In other words, I want the reader to be interested in the story by following the main male character’s search for the main female character. It is not clear what happened to her. Will he be able to find her? When and how did he lose her? Who in fact is she? The other search is not so much a search for himself as it is trying to understand himself as a writer and his relationship to his writing and art in general. Both searches are difficult, and loaded with uncertainty and mystery much like it is for anybody starting off to be an artist.
There are several passages of explicit sex scenes in the novel. How do they work in telling the story?
I am not sure what scenes you have in mind, nevertheless I will try and answer the question. The sex in the novel works by showing us something about the intensity of the physical connection between the two main characters and by extension an emotional connection. They are in love, or at the very least you can say they have a great lust for each other. The fact they separate in spite of this great physical connection adds weight and poignancy (and melancholy). I have always found it interesting to observe how people can connect physically – especially when they are in their 20s and 30s – and fail at maintaining a long-term relationship. They are both artists: she is a filmmaker and painter and he is an architect and teacher and poet. I wanted to suggest how they take risks demonstrating their intimacy, experiment, in their quest for artistic and personal freedom, reach to profoundly connect with each other. There is also the idea of sex as an escape from the sadness of art or it is a way of creating or evolving the self.
In one scene, one of the characters is reading one of your books. Why did you do this?
At the risk of sounding flip, I thought it was a fun thing to do. A wee joke in all the drama. The book he is reading also happens to fit in with what the character is thinking at that point in the novel. It came to me intuitively so I decided to put it in the story.
There are many Italian locations and Italian cultural references in the novel. Did your Italian background play a role in this work?
The COVID pandemic hit Canada in the middle of March 2020 when I sat down to start writing The Patina of Melancholy. Before this I had been in Italy in the Fall of 2019 working on a film and had toured large parts of Tuscany and Liguria in 2017 with my wife. In other words, large chunks of central Italy and the Italian Rivera where still freshly imprinted on my mind. Italy, outside of the beautiful art cities of say like Florence and Venice, is full of extraordinary landscapes and small pretty and well curated and gentile hilltop towns dating back to the Middle Ages. It is a different kind of beauty from the rugged beauty of Southern Italy. It all must have made an impression since I included some of what I saw in the novel.
What advice would you have for writers struggling to write erotic fiction?
Well, writing is always a struggle when you are starting out regardless if you are trying to write erotic fiction or any other kind of fiction. The struggle to find your voice, style, etc., subject or subjects, learning what you can do well when it comes to stringing sentences together; all of that is a big learning curve. Erotic fiction has its own special challenges in the sense of striking a balance between sensuality and avoiding porn whose sole purpose to is arouse the reader. Aim to write your own eroticism with precision, warm-hearted passion, and elegance. On the other hand, ignore anything I am suggesting, if you disagree, and figure out what works for you. The other challenge is finding good writers of erotic fiction to read and possibly learn from. There are not many. The stuff online such as Literotica is not very good. Then there is the challenge of finding a publisher who publishes erotic fiction, especially in Canada; almost no one in Canada publishes erotic fiction. I was fortunate to have a publisher (Ekstasis Editions) with whom I had a good publishing record. EE accepted The Patina of Melancholy to my amazement. Last, once you have a draft, find a reader to read your work and to discover what you got right – sight, sound, smell, taste, touch, the five senses, in other words – imagined or not – on paper.
What are you working on now?
I am starting to write a novel told from the point of view of an 88-year-old widowed Italian male who immigrated to Canada the year of the great Winnipeg Flood of 1950 which pretty much submerged half the city. Much snark and pathos expected. I am also helping edit and write some script for a documentary film called Small Gestures by Jeff McKay, a local film-maker. He uses my first book The Fate of Olives as a jumping off point to explore themes of family, immigration, and dislocation. I just finished working on reissuing my third poetry book Archeologia Eros (Chat Noir Café Editions) by adding an additional twenty-five poems to the collection: some of the additions are new poems, some are old poems (from past two collections), and some are old poems reconfigured. The book is a sort of greatest poetry hits plus new titles. Think of it in the same vein as those four other guys who issued a double album, only they were in a band.
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