Pinocchio is such a fixture of culture that most authors would be too nervous to interact with the classic story in any extended way. Edward Carey’s latest novel is audacious in this regard, giving
Still January? Check. Still pandemic? Check. Need a new book? Check, check, check. Visit a local indie bookstore — they re probably having a post-holiday slump too — and pick up
The Swallowed Man
, by Edward Carey.
The story of Pinocchio is something that has taken several shapes in my life. The first of course was the Disney story, known to most Americans by now. The second involved the discovery of Carlo Collodi’s
The Adventures of Pinocchio, a life-changing event the original novel which would seem to have served as the loosest possible inspiration for Disney’s Pinocchio. The relationship between the Disney and the Collodi was like the mask and the face.
Now we have, in a sense, the mirror, too:
The Swallowed Man, by the writer and artist Edward Carey, imagines Geppetto, inside the impossible five story cave that is belly of the massive dog-fish shark that swallowed him, awaiting what seems to him to be death, and writing, at last, the stories he has not told before now of his life as the creator of the wooden puppet who transformed into a human boy. Illuminated by Carey’s exquisitely textured original illustrations, the passages take on the
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