You, Bleeding Childhood by Michele Mari
You, Bleeding Childhood is the first English translation of Italian novelist Michele Mari, and a love letter to a childhood told through literature
It is easy to presume that most authors and writers are quite obsessed with books, but perhaps none more so than eminent Italian novelist Michele Mari. You, Bleeding Childhood, the first English translation of Mari’s work, is a series of autofictive stories that explore a childhood spent reading, pulling from the hauntings that arise from dust covers and broken spines. The kind of reading that absorbs the face value of the book-object first, ignoring the blurb entirely and diving right in. The kind of reading that assumes each book is the subject of profound attachment; a player and participant in the rich internal landscape of youth, conjuring images of internal spaces lurking and edged with fear – dark ceilings and gaps beneath beds and shapes behind curtains.
Mari’s prose is gushing, filled with flowing, full-bodied descriptions that enfold his readers in his pages – those same pages so intertextually full that they feel like a bookshelf or library in themselves, a stretched collection of underlined, doggeared, well-loved slabs of text. Mari's writing is always attentively attuned to the affect of spines and embossed metallic letters – things we don’t necessarily have words for, but are immediately legible to ourselves. Unspoken things that Mari illuminates as just as important and just as formative.
