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    The Color Inside a Melon
    The Color Inside a Melon
    The Color Inside a Melon
    Ebook441 pages7 hours

    The Color Inside a Melon

    By John Domini

    5/5

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    About this ebook

    *Author has won countless awards and fellowships, including an NEA Fellowship in Creative Wrting (non-fiction), Ingram-Merrill Foundation Fellowship (fiction), Meridian Editors’ Award (poetry), Iowa Arts Council Major Artist Grant (non-fiction), Northwestern U Center for the Writing Arts Study Grant (fiction) *Pulitzer prize finalist for an earlier work, Earthquake ID *Book reviewer and literary critic for the Washington Post, LitHub, Bookforum, Sewanee Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Brooklyn Rail, and other publications *Author's nonfiction essays on Naples have appeared in the New York Times, Lit Hub, Necessary Fiction, Zone 3, and elsewhere *Author has also won distinction in Italy, where he regularly tours and has connections to local booksellers; he was a featured speaker in Parole in Viaggio, Naples & Ravello, December 2017
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDzanc Books
    Release dateJun 11, 2019
    ISBN9781950539062
    The Color Inside a Melon
    Author

    John Domini

    The Millions hailed Domini’s latest book as “a new shriek for the new century.” This was MOVIEOLA!, his third collection of stories, and he also has three novels. Awards include an NEA Fellowship. His work has appeared in The New York Times and elsewhere, as well as in Italy. He’s a widely read critic and has taught at Harvard and Northwestern. He has family in on the East Coast and West, as well as Naples, and lives in Iowa with his wife, the science fiction writer Lettie Prell.

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    • 5/5

      John Domini’s latest novel, The Color Inside a Melon, begins in media res, with a confrontation between two African immigrants at a dance-party in Naples, and for the next 42 pages (all of chapter 1), it stays with that scene, delivering a kaleidoscopic view of the city’s underworld in high-energy prose, skittering between past and present to lay out the basics of the story: a grisly murder with a sexual connection and a man who wants to find the killer.

      That man is Aristofano Al’Kair, known by all as Risto, who fled violent Mogadishu as a child, leaving behind his family, and now, fifteen years later, has achieved great success. He runs a well-regarded art gallery called Wind & Confusion (a Biblical reference, but also suggesting the novel’s constant swirl) and lives in a nice apartment overlooking the bay with his wife Paola, a sexy and wise Italian native, and their two kids. But the happy life doesn’t prevent intrusions of Risto’s rough past. He’s haunted by flashbacks, and by recurring hallucinations of haloes that may or may not be a form of PTSD.

      The persistent memories of his hardscrabble journey as an immigrant bring Risto to investigate the murder. Though he didn’t know the victim, he feels a sense of duty to find out why the young man, also from Africa, was stabbed and mutilated—a death and desecration, Risto fears, that no one else will care about.

      The setup is a classic of film noir—a bizarre killing and a troubled hero in over his head—and Domini embraces the genre, giving us a femme fatale, a deal-making cop, shadowy characters, more bodies, rumors of greater evil, red herrings, and a wild scene at the end with the entire cast teetering at the edge of catastrophe.

      But the film-noir elements are less about plotting than they are about background and mood. Domini is more interested in relating the immigrant experience, mostly that of Black, African men—their attempt at assimilation or the resistance to it, the constant xenophobic and racist treatment, the clandestine business of fake I.D.s, the mispronunciation of one’s last name (an ongoing bit of comedy in the book), and that occasional longing for the country of origin. The details are superb. Here’s Risto remembering a policeman during his escape from ‘Dishu:

      As he made some prideful adjustment in his mufti, his eyes enflamed with khat though it wasn’t yet half past seven, his machete zigzagged before the faces of two or three squatters who hadn’t ducked into the scrub.

      Later, Risto stares at his view of the Gulf:

      The wakes of the fishing boats recalled the spring caterpillars in the Horn of Africa, a rare happy memory.

      Domini immerses you in the life of Naples, too. The author, whose next book is a memoir of his time in that city, knows the streets well.

      In the skyboxes of Naples, the depth of shadow took you back to when Caravaggio was in town, if not further. You could go all the way back to when Christ was a carpenter. Still, behind the door might be chiaroscuro, but it didn’t take an art historian to know what you’d find there. You’d have the opportunity, if you were of a mind, to cut a man’s throat.

      Domini’s sentences often spin out into unexpected places, with off-beat rhythms and riffs, mixing erudition, slang, cultural observation, and snippets of Italian. The style, at times, approaches stream-of-consciousness. And while sticking mainly to the mode of realism, Domini doesn’t let you forget that he’s a fan of the self-reflexive hijinks of meta-fiction (see his excellent collection of criticism, The Sea-God’s Herb). Characters speak about “film noir,” and Risto refers to the term “Movieola,” which happens to be the title of one of Domini’s short story collections.

      The density of it all may be occasionally overwhelming, but that “Wind & Confusion” mirrors the life of an immigrant in a city where everything’s different and strange. At the end, Risto’s friend sums things up by asking, “And isn’t our life here, in the North—isn’t it all a high-wire act?” Risto agrees, and the novel itself answers with a definite Yes.


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    The Color Inside a Melon - John Domini

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