Translated into English for the first time, Michele Mari’s story collection, You, Bleeding Childhood, is obsessive, neurotic, mimetic, strangely intimate, and absurdly funny. Published in Italian in the 1990s, this collection—supplemented with stories from Mari’s first collection, Euridice aveva un cane (Eurydice Had a Dog)—revisits emotional objects from Mari’s past, ruminates over troubling parental relationships, and confronts ghosts he can’t seem to scare off. In thirteen stories, Mari—who has been compared to Kafka, Borges, and Poe—says as much about literature, language, and meaning as he does about the memories he rewrites and the infatuations haunting his pages. 

In the opening story, “Comic Strips,” an father-to-be becomes manic when thinking about his future child encountering his comic books. The writing becomes frenzied—and, before long, the narrator is addressing his imagined offspring directly:

I close my eyes and I see you, quick little ghost, looking, rummaging, finding, flipping through the pages, I see you toss this worn Phantom into a corner […] you, fruit of my loins, not falling madly in love with the Phantom! I saw you: you gave a huff, you weren’t impressed! You seek comfort—and find it—in other books that mean nothing to me […].life always starts from scratch, it’s not as though you’d want to inherit Daddy’s emotions, Daddy’s memories, Daddy’s consciousness, and just insert it all into your little brain like a transplant, would you? 

The narrator remains haunted by the “ghost” of his child, by the differences between father and son, and by objects imbued with emotion. Anxieties abound, flourishing in the bizarre corners of the characters’ interior worlds. 

Language and literature also haunt this collection. “Comic Strips” straddles the divide between popular and literary as it reckons with the difference between father and imagined son. Stories like “Eight Writers” extend the idea of a “literary haunting” as Mari turns writers like Jules Verne and Daniel Defoe into fictional characters with whom his narrator can converse rather than simply speak to. 

“The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” explores what objects contain and evoke. In this story, the narrator speaks with his father in dreamlike sequences in which their voices sometimes merge. The father holds up various objects—a rifle, toy cars, marbles—and asks, “Do you recognize these?” Here, Mari considers the forgetting that inevitably accompanies memory, that acts as a foil to remembering. He asks readers to sit with the past in uncomfortable yet familiar ways. Who has not stumbled across an artifact from childhood and palmed the past as Mari’s stories invite us to? 

For many readers, Mari’s depictions of gun violence and school shootings—tackled in “They Shot Me and I’m Dead” and “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance”—will also, unfortunately, be all too familiar. Though one of the shortest stories in the collection, Mari’s use of second person is particularly powerful:

‘They shot me and I’m dead,’ you commented with the satisfaction that precise things give, and even when that scene had melted away, for a while you went on repeating the same words. ‘They shot me and I’m dead’—how many thousands of times did you utter this sentence? You would be walking to school, and a gloomy hatred for all your classmates would take hold of you; envisioning for them a thousand different deaths […] ’They shot me,’ you hissed, and already you felt lighter, already the hated faces began to fade; so you repeated, ‘they shot me,’ savoring each word, ‘shot, shot, shot.’

Here, memory involves the compulsion to relive, to recall—especially when speaking about traumatic or troubling memories. Elsewhere Mari writes: “How many thousands of times did you utter this sentence?” as if to ask, as so many now do, how many times will this unnecessary violence continue to happen?

Familial tension haunts these stories. Though the focus is often on fathers, “The Horror of Playgrounds,” one of my favorites, directs its gaze toward mothers. Mari’s narrator uses the phrase “social insects” to describe the mothers he observes, and his tone throughout remains analytical and cold. (Freud would have a field day.) Reading, I felt as though I was peering down on the narrator who, in turn, was holding, also from above, a magnifying glass over the playgrounds, mothers, and children he describes. Throughout this powerful collection, Mari forces readers to sit with uncomfortable realities as he rewrites them.

Mari’s neuroticism comes to a head in “The Black Arrow,” which depicts a father-son relationship riddled with anxiety before ending on a quieter—and perhaps lighter—note. This story also comments on the act of translation, on language, and on the collection of which it is a part. The narrator experiences intense anxiety his father gives him a book, one the narrator has already read. After realizing that his father gave him a different edition, he concludes that this shift changes “everything.” He explains:

I had gone in search of exterior discrepancies that might in some way grant the illusion that the two books did not coincide completely, and now I had found nothing short of a key that promised to unlock and fling wide between them a . . . a distance. Because really all it took was a single different word in the two translations for the innermost substance of the books to be superimposable no more: then I would be able to reread The Black Arrow as though it were a new story […]

Over the next several pages, the narrator explains, in excruciating detail, how a single word can so completely alter a work’s meaning. The effect is supremely satisfying, as Mari ruminates about what books have the potential to contain and what translations have the power to renew.

The effect of the collection’s last story, a conversation that may or may not be a transcription of Mari talking to himself, is so intimate, it feels like overhearing a secret. The narrator of “Down There” is pressed to capture his memories in words, as if the past will be lost if he does not make this frantic effort to articulate it. Made up of phrases like “One of the very first times I made a phone call” and “I once went to the movies,” the story is a fitting end to a collection that constantly asks: What are we—what are memories—made of? 

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One of Italy’s most renowned contemporary writers, Michele Mari has published ten novels, several short story and poetry collections, and translations of classic novels by Herman Melville, George Orwell, John Steinbeck and H. G. Wells. In recognition of his work, he has been awarded the Bagutta Prize, the Mondello Prize and the Selezione Campiello Prize. He was formerly a professor of Italian literature at the University of Milan.

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Brian Robert Moore has translated A Silence Shared by Lalla Romano, Meeting in Positano by Goliarda Sapienza, and the work of other distinguished Italian authors. He has received a National Endowment for the Arts Translation Fellowship, a Santa Maddalena Foundation Fellowship, and the PEN Grant for the English Translation of Italian Literature. His translation of the novel Verdigris by Michele Mari is forthcoming from And Other Stories.

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Court Ludwick is a writer, teacher, artist, and PhD student at the University of South Dakota. She is the author of These Strange Bodies, a hybrid collection forthcoming in 2024 from ELJ Editions. An associate poetry editor at South Dakota Review, she is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Broken Antler Magazine. Her poetry, essays, fiction, and criticism have appeared or are forthcoming in West Trade Review, New Note Poetry, Full House Literary Magazine, Jet Fuel Review, Oxford Magazine, Watershed Review, Eclectica Magazine, Sweet Tooth, and elsewhere. More of Court’s writing and art can be found on Instagram and Twitter @courtludwick, and on www.courtlud.com.