A standout selection of Mari’s stories, spinning out intricate, philosophical meditations on the paraphernalia of his youth, from comics to a collection of marbles… Superbly translated.” —Sam Sacks, Wall Street Journal
“There’s a Calvino-esque blend of the playful and the rigorous to this collection. A uniquely refreshing book . . . idiosyncratic, amusing and moving.” —John Self, The Guardian
“The translation by Brian Robert Moore is a gem. A delightful collection that pops with idiosyncrasy.” —Irish Times
“Short stories from an Italian maestro finally translated into English [...] Amusing, disturbing, intoxicating tales of childhood terrors and obsessions.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review
“Mari makes his English-language debut with a dazzling and sometimes surreal collection of reminiscences on childhood obsessions. [...] Mari delivers trenchant satires of nostalgia with deadpan grace and wit, resulting in stories that are as heartfelt as they are humorous, with great care given to descriptions of the characters’ foibles and idiosyncrasies. This is not to be missed.” —Publisher’s Weekly, starred review
“If I were to give a book award to a living Italian writer, man or woman, I'd pick Michele Mari.” —Domenico Starone, I-Italy
“The greatest living Italian writer.”— Andrea Coccia, Linkiesta
“Michele Mari has written only beautiful books. The most beautiful of the beautiful is the short story collection You, Bleeding Childhood.” —Elena Stancanelli, La Repubblica
“The charm that Mari exercises on his readers, from the most devoted to the most distracted, is incredible . . . More than anyone else, Michele Mari represents today a model of writer that seems on the point of disappearing—fully literary, lofty, in short, twentieth-century.” —Sara Marzullo, Esquire
“Emotion, anger, nostalgia: but also affectionate humor, indulgent sympathy [in] a work that masterfully combines elegance and irony, psychological acumen and an understanding of form, eclectic culture and emotional vulnerability. [The work of a child] who developed an unstoppable passion for adventure books, for comics . . . [who] cultivated a fetishistic relationship with thought, with the imagination; but also with a stubborn self, wounded by the intensity of his perceptions.” —Alida Airaghi, SoloLibri
“Michele Mari's mythology is that of the great darkness of Romanticism, even if he contemplates the oceans and the far places of the Earth from the safety of his library. I don't know if he is devoured . . . by an obsession, or if he is deeply enchanted . . . as by a vision he had in a dream . . . [But] he loves the darkness: crisscrossed by lightning, furrowed by thin trails of light. Around that night, his skillful rhetoric builds an endless echo chamber, in which his one voice resounds with the manifold voices of literature itself.” —Pietro Citati, La Repubblica
“The world of Michele Mari is a world where monsters and tutelary gods (interchangeable?), where sixteenth-century literature and classic sci-fi pocket paperbacks coexist in sinister harmony; where writing is exorcism and never punishment: the only way to escape the quotidian . . . Mari is one of those writers who feed on their own obsessions, know how to paint them with words and phrases, to arrange those phrases into novels embodying those same obsessions.”—Tiziano Gianotti, Linkiesta
★ 2023-04-12
Short stories from an Italian maestro finally translated into English.
The son of a domineering industrial designer and a children's book illustrator, Mari has been compared to Kafka and Borges for his unnerving yet humorous excavations of the psyche in which the pulpy influence of speculative fiction and pop art surfaces and glistens. In “Comic Strips,” an unnamed academic launches into a nostalgia-fueled frenzy upon learning of his impending fatherhood, and he rankles at the thought of what he assumes will be his unborn offspring’s lack of interest in his collection of comic books, ascribing to his future child “the adiaphorous passivity of the profaner.” Intergenerational conflict often serves as connective tissue between the loosely interlinked stories, as when one title from the professor’s shelves—the Italian SF magazine Urania—reappears in “The Covers of Urania,” a love letter to the fantastical monsters on each issue’s cover (“furry, slobbery, slimy, flaming, ungulate, bituminous, lobated, crested, gaseous, glutinous”), and we learn that the academic inherited the glossy comics from his grandfather. Originally published in Italian in the mid-1990s, Mari’s depictions of school violence will ring differently for American readers mired in an era of mass shootings. In “They Shot Me and I’m Dead,” the use of second person narration drives home a sickeningly familiar feeling: “a gloomy hatred for all your classmates would take hold of you; envisioning for them a thousand different deaths….” But the story spins into the surreal as the narrator imagines a bullet circumnavigating the planet, piercing even “the wood of trees, the brick and the cement of houses, the iron of beams, the ice of cliffs,” before seeking out its intended target. Freud would have a field day unpacking the many neuroses bundled up in Mari’s stories. Readers will, as well.
Amusing, disturbing, intoxicating tales of childhood terrors and obsessions.
