Brother Ludovico

In Brother Maria, poet and playwright who writes under the pseudonym of Brother Ludovico, tells a story set in 14th century Italy during the time of the largest and most fatal pandemic in recorded human history, the Black Death. Nominated for a Pulitzer Prize by publisher Rodney Charles, the tome is a medieval historical fiction and follows a pious, reverent Franciscan monk named Father Giovanni, and his younger, rebellious counterpart, Brother Maria, a friend and fellow monk, who eventually leaves his life of faith. Brother Ludovico explains, “As fate would be, [Brother Maria] fell from his monkhood and he became what we would call a reprobate and he went the other way. He became not only a reprobate, but a profligate, and a lover of the other, the sensual side of life. This is in contrast, he’s an archetype, and this is in contrast with the archetype of an abbot and Father Giovanni who became his friend, who was a very close friend in the monastery and so on, and Father Giovanni is a very strict religious and a very good man… but they retain their friendship over the years… those years including the years when the Great Famines that precursed the Black Death were sweeping through Italy and then the Black Death itself. That juxtaposition, Brother Maria the profligate and the saintly abbot, is present in the book and the reason that I’ve done this, the play on this, this difference between the sensual and the spiritual, the feminine and the masculine… I wanted to create the human being naked of all, of starting over again. The Black Death destroyed all of the institutions…”

Despite the sheer volume of pages, Brother Ludovico decided to keep the story within one novel rather than breaking it into several books because he felt that, while all the chapters are complete on its own, they are all interwoven and should be kept together in one larger work. He explained, “It’s a hard thing, you know, to actually talk about… it has strands that go throughout the whole book…I know that they’ve approached a number of authors and the authors kind of take my side. They’re vehemently against it because it’s one, basically, one thought and the author doesn’t really want it to interrupted sharply… there’s an invisible, intangible building that occurs, or at least the writer wants to occur in the reader… and there are other things about Brother Maria that if I was to adapt a modern mentality to, would not be Brother Maria. I want it to be wild and raw. I want it to be a wild, poetic opus of the soul… reach for its depths and so on. I want it to be unlicensed. I think that’s why… It doesn’t come out true with me thinking that I’m going to be writing three novels that have to fit together. It doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen.”