"Otto scrittori" by Michele Mari: from the Threads of Imagination to the Needle of Syntax

Abstract

This article aims to show particular aspects of Milanese author Michele Mari’s literature through his short story Otto scrittori (2019 [1997]), included in the anthology Tu, sanguinosa infanzia (2009). Mari is a writer who simultaneously thematizes concepts from postmodernism and distances himself from them by returning to the classics and literary styles of the Settecento and the Ottocento, for example. His work experiments with and goes through various literary forms, such as the Gothic, the Fantastic, and the adventure books. In Mari, the idea of writing is linked with childhood and its losses, with the private but also the collective world, with the (episodic) fragment but also the long narratives. Otto scrittori is a short story that contains these aspects. It displays an intense treatment of language and intertextuality through the inclusion of works and authors such as Poe, Stevenson, and Salgari, just to mention three of the eight. This article’s goal is to read and analyze the literary elements that constitute Mari’s fantastic narrative in the short story Otto scrittori, and to highlight linguistic features proper to Mari’s writing which philologist Luca Serianni (2021) called “hyperliterary”.