Carmelo Militano’s latest novel The Patina of Melancholy explores the sensual relationship between two unnamed characters and how memory both preserves and distorts their past and present together. The novel is at once a noir detective story, an exploration of art and memory, and a passionate love story.
She is an elusive artist; he is a writer unravelling her mysterious disappearance from his life. She seeks to understand herself, her art, her unexplainable restlessness. He is an unsentimental poet uncovering their shared travels, lovers, their passionate memories across Europe and Canada.
The novel is also an exploration of the artist’s journey, and Militano’s writing is by turns lyrical, evocative, and erotically charged.

In The Patina of Melancholy his latest novel, Carmelo Militano takes his readers on a perceptive journey of sensual self-discovery- both physical and philosophical- that questions what is attainable and unattainable in love and art and memory.
The Patina of Melancholy is also an erotic story of found and lost love; a journey away and towards a relationship.
Militano uses suggestive quotes, evocative language, to reveal his characters’ desire, unexplainable yearnings, melancholia, nostalgia; their success and failure. In short, a form of “melancholy”, and its shades of feeling and meaning.
Militano’s craft is clearly up to the task. We are treated to lush lyrical descriptions of landscape: Tuscany and the Algarve; the cityscapes of Lisbon, Paris, Porto, Winnipeg; the human body in exquisite moments of lust and love.
This is a novel I encourage you to read, to read slowly, and savor its wonderful evocative prose.
~ Michael Carrino author of In No Hurry and
By Available Light: New & Selected Poems

Militano’s writing can be stingingly noir in the tradition of Chandler. Psychological and erotic tensions abound. And Militano writes compassionately and evocatively… He is an authentic voice we can trust.
~ Bruce Hunter on Lost Aria