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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,
By
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,
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.,
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.
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