Michele Mari


Michele Mari is an Italian novelist, short story writer, academic critic and poet. The son of a Milanese industrial designer and artist, Enzo Mari, Mari teaches Italian literature at the Università Statale di Milano; he is considered one of the leading experts of 18th Century Italian literature.

Important themes

Mari is a philologist and a connoisseur of science fiction and comics. In his short stories the theme of childhood and adolescence as moments to be devoutly preserved recurs often ; other important motifs are the obsession for other people's life that one could not live, of literature as ersatz life, of memory and its workings.
Mari intensely dislikes change, so he mistrusts modernity in its more vulgar and showy aspects; he is fascinated by obsessive personalities ; he nonchalantly mixes fact and fiction in his works, both in those with an overwhelming autobiographic component, and in those novels where he uses, like a puppeteer, historical characters .
Mari is a parodist, whose prose may easily imitate that of more famous authors. He has a style similar to that of other Italian fiction writers like Carlo Emilio Gadda, Tommaso Landolfi and Giorgio Manganelli, and also the French author Louis-Ferdinand Céline. His two novels Verderame and Rosso Floyd, though continuing Mari's stylistic care and formal innovation, achieved some real suspense by borrowing narrative devices from crime, gothic, and horror fiction.
Mari won the Premio Grinzane Cavour in 2008, as Supervincitore of the Narrativa italiana section, with his novel Verderame.
Mari is also a poet and an academic scholar ; he also wrote essays on European and American fantastic literature. He played in the Osvaldo Soriano Football Club, the Italian writers' national football team.

Works

Fiction

Novels