Pinocchio in Venice

"So Pinocchio gets his wish and becomes a real boy. And he lives happily ever after." If only life were like a fairy tale. We would all be loved and protected by our mothers and fathers forever and none of us would ever grow old or suffer the infirmities of aging. Unfortunately, like everyone else, Pinocchio does grow old and may even be dying. Despite having had a successful life in academia in America and having achieved world-wide renown as an art scholar, an author, and as a two time Nobel Prize winner, in his dotage Pinocchio looks back upon a life filled with unhappiness and regret. Unlike the often inaccurate Disney biography, Gepetto, his creator and father, was not a kindly old man, nor did his mother, the blue-haired fairy, keep all the promises she made to him during his boyhood. To add to Pinocchio's agony, various bodily parts and his skin are falling off, his feet had been burnt off in a fire, and his nose is not what it is purported to be. Worst of all, he is once again turning into a piece of wood.In the book Pinocchio is shown returning to his birth place, Venice, and is reunited with his old friends (including two talking dogs) and foes alike. He attends a wild and raucous masked carnival in which he is the guest of honor.Robert Coover is a marvelously imaginative story teller. His use of language and imagery transforms Pinocchio's surroundings into a panorama of grotesque characters and nightmarish situations. Pinocchio is presented not as a puppet, but as a true to life human being of great dignity. He suffers the universal fears of growing old: leaving unfinished business, failures in love, the attending loss of physical and mental powers, and the inevitability of death. All this is realistically and sensitively rendered by Mr. Coover.

Coover has no truck with the security, the romantic haze even, the complacent ease with which the story of Venice is enshrouded, and seeks to shatter the rosy-red miasma that surrounds all things Venetian. Thus destabilised, the reader becomes prey (open to?) a new, more unsettling, and ultimately keener edged storytelling (the safety of the familiar overthrown). Pinocchio is cindered: forget his feet, he is totalised. There is a huge energy in reframing the familiar, and seeing it so vividly anew. Readers ought to be pachyderms to deal with the "every canal an open sewer" of Coover's scatalogical depositary of a book. But suspend your sense of disbelief (probably meaning nausea) and revel in the language - it has more arabesques and whirls, more swoops and pirouettes than anything contemporary you are likely to read (at the rear end of a Vaporetto, lazily sweeping along Tronchetto, or past Zattere...) Those evil frog-types - Venice will never be the same again.

I bought this book in Tokyo at Kinokuniya bookstore in 1991. I had never read anything by Coover before. The first thing I noticed was that the guy could write; write as well as Beckett; that he was a follower of Beckett, actually. From the first to the last word I was awed by his command of the english sentence. I remembered Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio well, so I was also delighted by the internal jokes, by the playful, carnival-like atmosphere of the book. Masterworks like Spanking the Maid, Charlie in the House of Rue and Ghost Town have only confirmed the fact that Coover is on a different level from other american novelists. Let's face it, american fiction has plummeted from the zenith it reached in the days of Hemingway and Faulkner. Those two writers could be put side by side with Kafka and Borges as short story writers; or Joyce, Celine and Beckett as novelists. Hemingway and Faulkner even created writing styles that lesser writers copied, pasted and edited. After the war we have Nabokov, almost at the same level as the great pair; then we have Bellow, Mailer and Salinger, a little below in the pecking order; and then Roth and Barth, ditto; and later on: Pynchon, Anne Tyler, Carver, etc. An almost perfect example of the law of diminishing returns. I say almost because there are some exceptions: Flannery O'Connor and Robert Coover being two of the most notable.That much said, this is one of Coover's best books, a little childish in places, but a delight from beginning to end. And after all, Hemingway and Faulkner were only two great writers, so if we could only get someone to pair with Coover as the other towering figure in contemporary American Lit(Annie Dillard or Grace Pailey, maybe) we'll be, not even, but close enough to that peak.

"Pinocchio" certainly is postmodern literature at its best. This book reverses Collodi's fairy-tale ( so don't be surprised when the puppet becomes a piece of wood again at the end of the story ), fills the blanks left open in the original tale with some hilariously funny and sometimes absurdly unreal stories, and, moreover, mixes everything with excerpts from quite a few literary classics, "Don Quixote" and "Death in Venice" among them. Big-time comedy and good entertainment guaranteed!