![]() ![]() The 19th-century Italian author, who wrote the book that inspired the Disney movie and countless other adaptations (including the live-action reboot released last week and another version from the director Guillermo del Toro coming out later this year), saw his character very differently.Ī radical political commentator who turned to children’s literature late in life, Collodi wrote a complex, unsettling novel-miles away from the morality tale that Pinocchio’s story has become. At this, Carlo Collodi would most likely shake his head. The Disney cartoon version will be wiped from your memory by this handsome new edition of Carlo Collodi's beloved Pinocchio, translated by Geoffrey Brock, with an introduction by Umberto Eco and brilliant, full-page color illustrations by pre-eminent Italian illustrator Fulvio Testa.Asked to name the two most important things about Pinocchio, most Americans would answer: First, his nose grows when he lies, and second, he is a wooden puppet who dreams of becoming a real boy. The superiority of the Collodi original to the Disney adaptation lies in its reluctance to make the inner motivations of the story explicit….No less than Proust’s novel in search of lost time, story is a search for his lost childhood.Īny list, I think, must begin with Pinocchio. Geoffrey Brock’s superbly crafted translation and Umberto Eco’s introduction bring to life this tale of gumption and greed. This new translation revives the sardonic wit and black humour of the original.Ĭarlo Collodi’s Pinocchio…is short on Disneyesque sentimentality (there is a talking cricket, but Pinocchio squashes him), long on satire and farce. This childhood classics has had numerous interpretations.Translator Brock gives readers Collodi's Pinocchio: a lazy troublemaker, self-centered and distractible, who remains a wooden puppet right up until the end of his adventures.Testa's pen, ink and watercolor illustrations appear opposite the text, filling the oversized pages.Parents and libraries should welcome this edition, appealing and accessible for 21st-century children.ĭisney’s sentimental depiction of Pinocchio bears little resemblance to Collodi’s unscrupulous puppet. His gentle, brightly colored cartoons soften some of the darker scenes in the story.without minimizing Pinocchio's mischievous nature. Readers not ready to tackle the story in Italian, however, will be more than satisfied with Brock's lovely translation, which is accompanied by new artwork from Testa. "Though written in the nineteenth century, the original Pinocchio remains as readable as if it had been written in the twenty-first, so limpid and simple is its prose," writes Umberto Eco in the introduction. ![]() Geoffrey Brock’s acclaimed new translation is reissued in an edition for children with more than fifty full-page watercolors by Fulvio Testa.īy Carlo Collodi, introduction by Umberto Eco, illustrated by Fulvio Testa, translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock Thronged with memorable characters and composed with the fluid but inevitable logic of a dream, Pinocchio is an endlessly fascinating work that is essential equipment for life. A sublime anomaly, the book merges the traditions of the picaresque, of street theater, and of folk and fairy tales into a work that is at once adventure, satire, and a powerful enchantment that anticipates surrealism and magical realism. Pinocchio the novel, no less than Pinocchio the character, is one of the great inventions of modern literature. To the contrary, Pinocchio is a madcap genius hurtled along at the pleasure and mercy of his desires, a renegade who in many ways resembles his near contemporary Huck Finn. That story is of course about a puppet who, after many trials, succeeds in becoming a “real boy.” Yet it is hardly a sentimental tale. ![]() Though one of the best-known books in the world, Pinocchio at the same time remains unknown-linked in many minds to the Walt Disney movie that bears little relation to Carlo Collodi’s splendid original. ![]()
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