An author who started writing in a neo-realist strain soon after the Second World War, he developed an individualistic style, part scientific observance, part flight of fancy which places him on the literary map somewhere near Jorge Luis Borges, but still in his own, unique, place. His works include Marcovaldo, Cosmicomics and If on a Winter's Night a Traveller . Myth is the hidden part of every story, the buried part, the region that is still unexplored because there are as yet no words to enable us to get there. The narrator's voice in the daily tribal assemblies is not enough to relate the myth.
Myth is nourished by silence as well as by words.
Myth tends to crystallize instantly, to fall into set patterns, to pass from the phase of myth-making into ritual, and hence out of the hands of the narrator into those of the tribal institutions responsible for the preservation and celebration of myths. He goes on circling around them, inventing new developments in composition, until in the course of this methodical and objective labour he suddenly gets another flash of enlightenment from the unconscious and the forbidden. And this forces the tribe to change its set of signs once more.