![]() ![]() ![]() And it's not really the dimensionality of characterization - another author may have done something different, like, portray a fully-fleshed=out 3D human Pinocchio slowly losing a dimension as his flesh falls and he becomes wooden once again, perhaps traili Coover's Pinocchio is yet another of Coover's novels which the weak of heart and the easily queezey ought to avoid. ![]() It's not the excessive poop stuff or the sex stuff we all have to put up with that stuff on a daily basis, like breathing. This was my least favorite Coover but still one of the better books I’ve read this year.Ĭoover's Pinocchio is yet another of Coover's novels which the weak of heart and the easily queezey ought to avoid. My 3 stars are strictly within the Coover Galaxy, much as Vonnegut says he can give himself an A+ for Cat’s Cradle “while knowing that there was a writer named William Shakespeare”. In rating this book I’m stealing from Vonnegut grading of his own novels. His lurid images blaze in the mind like retinal echoes from staring at the sun. Coover isn’t just undressing a classic novella and children’s story, he’s slathering it in mineral oil and making it wrestle naked with angry bobcats. Like the first time you listened to Total Eclipse of the Heart and you weren’t entirely sure whether Bonnie Tyler’s larynx would hold out through to the end of the song. It has rollicking scenes heading pell-mell through a narrative that the reader can’t help but think the whole thing is going to screech off the page. This work meets the basic criteria: it’s absurd, it is ribald, it is rife with satire. I think Wikipedia is missing a trick if Pinocchio in Venice isn’t the progenitor of bizarro fiction then it is certainly its godfather. I just did a search on the bizarro genre of fiction and it looks like the form is credited to having begun in 1999. The more recent the reading of those two, the better. Yes, it is possible to read this work of Coover without first having read A Death in Venice and Collodi’s Pinocchio, but the reader would unfortunately miss out on entirely too many jokes and plot points divined from those works. I I cannot remember the last piece of fiction I’ve read that had required reading as a prerequisite. ![]() I cannot remember the last piece of fiction I’ve read that had required reading as a prerequisite. Or, as the immortal Immaculate Kunt once said, in an attempt to describe by way of the practical reason the odor of sanctity: 'Toe-cheese is only the half of it.'" It's like going after the ineffable with a butterfly net, or trying to catch time in a teaspoon. "Yes, or a theologian trying to imagine the taste of manna, which has been likened severally unto angel breath, Orphic eggs, the froth on a virgin's milk, pressed mistletoe, dream jelly, lingam dew, fairy pee, the alchemical Power of Projection, and the excreta of greenflies on tamarisk leaves. "Impossible really," he says, describing for Melampetta the film studio's futile attempts to cast the part of the Blue-Haired Fairy, "like a painter trying to paint the color of air, or a composer reaching for the sound of grace-" Which, after awhile, I really couldn't do. Like maybe you have to cross the same bridge twice to get it. With Coover you never know if his scatalogical double entendre is mere slapstick or hides a deeper meaning. Like when the one talking dog sayeth to the other talking dog: With all that hard thinking you do, Mela, I'm surprised your rectum doesn't fall out. We are given that warning early on in this ribald, phantasmagorical novel, early enough that the wordplay and the spoof on Collodi's classic work was still fun. to reach some places you must cross a bridge twice. With Coover you never know if his scatalogical double entendre is mere slapstick or hides a deeper m Venice is not like other cities. ![]()
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