| Michele Mari | |
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| Born | 1955 Milan, Italy |
| Occupation | University professor, novelist, short story writer, poet, literary critic and reviewer |
| Nationality | Italian |
| Genres | Novel, short story, poetry |
| Literary movement | Postmodernism |
| Notable work(s) | Tutto il ferro della Torre Eiffel, Rondini sul filo, Tu, sanguinosa infanzia |
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Michele Mari is an Italian novelist, short story writer, academic critic and poet. The son of a prestigious Milanese industrial designer and artist, Enzo Mari, Michele teaches Italian literature at the Università Statale di Milano; he is considered one of the leading experts of Eighteenth-Century Italian literature.
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Mari is a philologist and a connoisseur of science fiction (see his poetic essay "Le copertine di Urania" in Tu, sanguinosa infanzia, 1997) and comics. In his short stories the theme of childhood and teenage as moments to be devoutly preserved recurs often (cf. the story "I palloni del signor Kurtz", in Euridice aveva un cane, 1993); other important motifs are the obsession for other people's life that one could not live (in the short story "Euridice aveva un cane", 1993, or in Rondini sul filo, 1999), of literature as ersatz life, of memory and its workings (Verderame, 2007).
Mari intensely dislikes change, so he mistrusts modernity in its more vulgar and showy aspects; he is fascinated by obsessive personalities (Walter Benjamin in Tutto il ferro della Torre Eiffel, Roger Waters in Rosso Floyd); he nonchalantly mixes fact and fiction in his works, both in those with an overwhelming autobiographic component (Rondini sul filo, Tu, sanguinosa infanzia, Filologia dell'anfibio), and in those novels where he uses, like a puppetteer, historical characters (Benjamin and Marc Bloch - plus countless other writers and artists - in Tutto il ferro della Torre Eiffel, the Italian romantic poet Giacomo Leopardi in Io venia pien d'angoscia a rimirarti, the members of the Pink Floyd band in Rosso Floyd) .
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 (especially in Rondini sul filo). His two most recent novels, Verderame and Rosso Floyd, though continuing Mari's stylistic care and formal innovation (especially the latter), achieved some real suspense by borrowing narrative devices from crime, gothic, and horror fiction (something Mari had already done at the beginning of his career in his second novel, Io venia pien d'angoscia a rimirarti).
Mari won the Premio Grinzane Cavour in 2008, as Supervincitore of the Narrativa italiana section, with his novel Verderame.
Mari is also a poet (Cento poesie d'amore a Ladyhawke, Einaudi 2007) and an academic scholar (cf. his monographs L'Iliade di Vincenzo Monti, 1982; Venere celeste e venere terrestre, 1988; Momenti della traduzione fra Settecento e Ottocento, 1994; Il genio freddo: La storiografia letteraria di Girolamo Tiraboschi, 1999); he also wrote essays on European and American fantastic literature (I demoni e la pasta sfoglia, Quiritta 2004). He played in the Osvaldo Soriano Football Club, the Italian writers' national football team.