Ezra's Bookshelf

The Adventures of Pinocchio

by Carlo Collodi · 113 pages · ~2 hrs

Fiction

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Carlo Collodi's 1883 tale of a wooden puppet who wants to become a real boy has become so familiar through adaptations that the original is often overlooked. Collodi, an Italian journalist, began the story as a serial that he repeatedly tried to end with Pinocchio's death, only to be pressured by readers and publishers to continue. The resulting narrative is darker and stranger than Disney's version: Pinocchio is hanged, nearly burned, transformed into a donkey, and swallowed by a giant shark. The talking cricket, far from being a benevolent conscience, is crushed early in the story. Collodi used the puppet's adventures to satirize Italian society and moralize about the importance of education, obedience, and hard work. The book's enduring power comes from its central metaphor: the tension between the desire for pleasure and the demands of responsibility, between remaining a puppet of impulse and becoming a real person. Collodi's prose is lively and often funny, full of wordplay and sharp observation. This is the authentic Pinocchio, more complex and more unsettling than its sanitized adaptations, a meditation on what it takes to become fully human.

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