You, bleeding childhood

Mari makes his English-language debut with a dazzling and sometimes surreal collection of reminiscences on childhood obsessions. In "Comic Strips," a new father struggles to decide if his son should read the comics he enjoyed in his own youth. It's a moving meditation, conveying compassion for both the child to be and the child the father once was. The narrator of "The Covers of Urania" catalogs the covers ("You crystals, and you gelatins, and you philosophic mantises, and you pedunculated pods, how plausible you were, how perfect you were! How capable you were of melancholy!") of the sci-fi magazine that shaped his imagination and colors his memories of boyhood, whether it's a dream he once had of Robert Louis Stevenson asking to borrow back issues or the recollection of receiving news of his grandfather's death. In "Jigsawed Greens," a mother and son bond over their shared love of puzzles, pushing their passion to absurd lengths as they search for bigger and bigger canvases. Mari delivers trenchant satires of nostalgia with deadpan grace and wit, resulting in stories that are as heartfelt as they are humorous, with great care given to descriptions of the characters' foibles and idiosyncrasies. This is not to be missed. (July)

Short stories from an Italian maestro finally translated into English. The son of a domineering industrial designer and a children's book illustrator, Mari has been compared to Kafka and Borges for his unnerving yet humorous excavations of the psyche in which the pulpy influence of speculative fiction and pop art surfaces and glistens. In "Comic Strips," an unnamed academic launches into a nostalgia-fueled frenzy upon learning of his impending fatherhood, and he rankles at the thought of what he assumes will be his unborn offspring's lack of interest in his collection of comic books, ascribing to his future child "the adiaphorous passivity of the profaner." Intergenerational conflict often serves as connective tissue between the loosely interlinked stories, as when one title from the professor's shelves--the Italian SF magazine Urania--reappears in "The Covers of Urania," a love letter to the fantastical monsters on each issue's cover ("furry, slobbery, slimy, flaming, ungulate, bituminous, lobated, crested, gaseous, glutinous"), and we learn that the academic inherited the glossy comics from his grandfather. Originally published in Italian in the mid-1990s, Mari's depictions of school violence will ring differently for American readers mired in an era of mass shootings. In "They Shot Me and I'm Dead," the use of second person narration drives home a sickeningly familiar feeling: "a gloomy hatred for all your classmates would take hold of you; envisioning for them a thousand different deaths…." But the story spins into the surreal as the narrator imagines a bullet circumnavigating the planet, piercing even "the wood of trees, the brick and the cement of houses, the iron of beams, the ice of cliffs," before seeking out its intended target. Freud would have a field day unpacking the many neuroses bundled up in Mari's stories. Readers will, as well. Amusing, disturbing, intoxicating tales of childhood terrors and obsessions. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.