Pinocchio in Venice (Coover, Robert) [Paperback]

Robert Coover (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: January 10, 1997 | Series: Coover, Robert

Internationally renowned author Robert Coover returns with a major new novel set in Venice and featuring one of its most famous citizens, Pinocchio. The result is a brilliant philosophical discourse on what it means to be human; a hilarious, bawdy adventure; and a fitting tribute to the history, grandeur, and decay of Venice itself.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Arms and legs askew, puppet with a nose problem and a yen to be human, Pinocchio is back, and Coover--wordsmith par excellence, sly storyteller, master maker of such fictions as Pricksongs and Des cants, The Universal Baseball Assoc., and The Public Burning --has him in his crafty, string-pulling, postmodern mitts. Poor Pinocchio, his wish granted, is an aged, much-honored scholar who returns home to complete a book on the Blue-Haired Fairy and to die: He is returning to wood. In Coover's version, anything can, and does, happen, as Pinocchio's human self relives its twig-hood adventures. Coover is at his best in this wildly comic fable. Highly recommended.
- Vincent D. Balitas, Allentown Coll., Center Valley, Pa.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Scientific American

Mr. Coover's work has long occupied a place of honor. . . . He goes at his task with an almost alarming linguistic energy, a Burgessy splatter of vocabulary, and a ferocious love of everything comic and grotesque. This is a spectacularly scatalogical work. . . . Often erotic and frequently hilarious.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 330 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1st Grove Press ed edition (January 10, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802134858
• ISBN-13: 978-0802134851
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,218,207 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars In life there are no happily ever afters, May 26, 2002

By 

IRA Ross (LYNDHURST, NJ United States 07071) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Pinocchio in Venice (Hardcover)

"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.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant without being enjoyable, April 29, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Pinocchio in Venice (Coover, Robert) (Paperback)

Before tackling this book by that real boy, that master of juvenile linguistic pyrotechnics(some of Coover's convoluted sentences are as witty as anything written by anyone in English this century) the reader, and there won't be too many casual or should I say causal readers, should study the original Pinnochio. Those whose familiarity with Pinnochio comes only from the Disney movie won't get the in-jokes. What's with the obsession with Pinnochio among post-modern authors of coldly intellectual books that appeal only to other writers who teach writing? I'm thinking of Jerome Charyn's send up of Pinnochio, "Pinnochio's Nose," another picaresque novel that was a virtuoso performance, but instantly forgettable.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Venice in ruins, I enjoy to rebuild., February 27, 2002

By 

Huck PortlyFellow "Huck" (Eulyrrhia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Pinocchio in Venice (Hardcover)

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.