Book 8: Le Avventure di Pinocchio (The Adventures of Pinocchio, 1881-83)

"Pinocchio," it turns out, is a fairly big and complex book — not the kid-sized read I thought I could breeze through in half an hour. It's also darker and more surreal than I had imagined. The fairy who watches over Pinocchio, for example, has blue hair and may or may not be dead. She's the "Blue-haired Fairy." In the Disney movie, the "Blue Fairy" is simply a good-lookin' blonde in a blue dress. Go figure. In the movie, Jiminy Cricket plays a prominent role, not only as the narrator but as the conscience of Pinocchio throughout. In the book, Pinocchio murders the interfering cricket immediately because he wants him to shut the hell up.

Pinocchio is a little shit. I don't mean he's merely ornery either. I mean he's a total selfish bastard, whom you don't even feel sorry for when he sleeps too close to the fire and burns his wooden feet off, rendering him immobile. The original drawing of him by Enrico Mazzanti, at left, is far more suggestive of his knavery than Walt Disney's cuddly depiction. Why does Geppetto bother to make this ingrate a new pair of feet? Can't he see Pinocchio will use them not to walk to school like a good little boy but to wreak more havoc? It's textbook codependency.

It's a shame we can't read an original source with our minds absolutely clear of the subsequent, more wildly popular, incarnations. One becomes unduly focused on comparisons — Why was this element left out? Why was that added? Why is this character so different? Why, to provide a specific example, is this profoundly Tuscan setting given an almost Swiss feel in the movie? — instead of just appreciating the original text, which in the case of "Pinocchio" is a truly bizarre and garish dreamscape, rife with sadism and fear, fantastic characters and absurd situations, not the least of which is a puppet who cannot be controlled, even by his own creator.

Carlo Collodi, a journalist from Florence, wrote "Le Avventure di Pinocchio" in the early 1880s as a serialized fairy tale in Italy's first newspaper for children. It was a morality tale about how people — not just children — should behave. They should work for their money rather than expecting handouts or miracles. They should not be the pawns of the rich, nor the dupes of the greedy. They should take care of their relatives. They should be grateful for the good things in life. They should value education. They should be generous. In the original serialized version, Pinocchio is unable to mend his ways and is actually hanged for his failures. There's some nice kid lit for you.

Collodi's editors got him to revisit this outcome, and he ended up adding several chapters, giving us the beloved ending of the wooden puppet whose eventual goodness turns him into a real boy. And presumably he grows up, unlike the Anglo boy par excellence Peter Pan, to be a real man, whose nose — can we assume? — stays the same length whether or not he tells lies.

Apparently the story of Pinocchio did not become an astronomical best-seller until it was translated into English a decade later. Thus Collodi, like many a writer, died never knowing that his creation became one of the most recognized fictional characters in the world. When the movie came out in 1940 — it was only Disney's second full-length feature; the first was "Snow White" — Pinocchio became a household word, and "When You Wish Upon a Star," from its soundtrack, a madly popular tune.

The movie has its own charms — Geppetto's fantastic cat Figaro, for one, who does not appear in the novel — and it does pay homage to Collodi by using the framing device of his book. Jiminy Cricket is seen opening the lavish, heavy tome titled "Pinocchio" to begin his tale, signaling to the audience that the source material is something venerable and antique, i.e., a piece of writing.

My favorite thing from the book may be the "phlegmatic snail." (Do words like "phlegmatic" even appear in children's literature these days? I hope so). The snail is like a lady-in-waiting to the Blue-haired Fairy. Pinocchio shouts up to the fourth-story window where she's sitting. He needs help immediately. She says sure, she'll be right down. Nine hours later she opens the door — vividly illustrating a "snail's pace" and giving Pinocchio a lesson in industry and patience.

Note: When I was looking up information about Collodi, I came across a really interesting article in the New York Review of Books about how Collodi's "Pinocchio" helped shape a national identity after the Italian city states in the mid-19th century unified into the country now known as Italy. "Pinocchio" illustrated something all the diverse regions had in common and could thus rally around: an "irreverent and skeptical pessimism."

Book 7: Una Donna (A Woman, 1906)

This novel by Sibilla Aleramo is a feminist classic in continental Europe but is not widely known here. Published in 1906, it precedes Virginia Woolf's "A Room of One's Own," the feminist touchstone in English, by more than two decades.

Aleramo is not the writer that Woolf is (but who is?). Her book occasionally gets mired in sentimental rambling that you'd never see in Woolf, but it also teems with insights and observations about women's experience that still — a hundred years later — sharply resonate.

The plot of her novel is simple and, when you discover it is autobiographical, shocking. The main character is, as the teenaged Aleramo was, raped by a man and compelled to marry him. Apparently the practice of "seducing," i.e., sexually assaulting, girls was common at that time in rural Italy as a way of procuring a bride. After the act, the girl is "ruined" and must look to her rapist and the "legitimization" of marriage as the only entry back into society.

Because the culture is so deeply misogynistic, the full horror of this union is not immediately apparent to the girl. She even determines to love the man, partially to make a virtue of necessity, but also because her mind simply can't abandon her youthful ideals and hopes. Growing up in an educated, liberal household — before her father accepted a job in the Marche, a rural region of Italy — she had not felt the constraints of her gender. "I had never acknowledged that being a woman might affect my future." She had imagined freedom, deep love for a soulmate and satisfying work as the rewards of adulthood.

She thinks these things are still in her reach after the marriage, despite all the contrary signs. "I wanted to believe in my happiness, present and future. I wanted love to be a grand and beautiful experience. I was sixteen and wanted a love which would incorporate all the mysterious poetry of life."

But wishing can't make this so. Her husband has other ideas. The incalculable selfishness that allowed him to rape her — and the society that nodded its approval — allows him to continue on a course wherein she is little more than a domestic servant, existing to satisfy his various needs. It's a backwater Italian culture where men are never expected to grow up or develop empathy. They go from being fawned-over, egotistical sons to fawned-over, egotistical husbands. A domestic world in which they are not at the center, with all other family members in faithful orbit, is simply inconceivable.

Eventually her determination to love him and make the best of her fate unravels. He has no notion of the tenderness and "color" and love she had longed for as a girl growing up in urban, "magical" Milan. (The differences between the industrial, sophisticated north and the primitive, peasant-filled south are a big theme in Italian literature, I'm finding). He is jealous and intellectually inferior and often offends her "love for rationality." He wins arguments because he is a man and childish, not because he is right. He is terrible at love, treating her body only as a receptacle for his lust. "Was I merely to be used as an object of pleasure, sensually debased in a relentless round of days and nights, until I died?" she grimly asks. "Did this man own me?"

As the questions mount, she realizes the hopelessness of her determination to love him. It's an enterprise dependent on absolute self-neglect. The self-sacrifice and submission touted as the feminine ideal seem more and more like nice words for self-hatred.

When she becomes pregnant, she believes she at last has a reason to live, that a child will supply the missing tenderness and human connection she had longed for. She is right. She loves her son and he loves her. She wants to be an interesting parent for him, an interesting person. She wants to write and travel and enjoy life, as much for his sake as for her own. But this is impossible, she discovers. Her husband legally "owns" his child, just like he owns her, and he has different plans. End of story.

Eventually she musters the strength to leave, to head off to sun-drenched Rome, with its piazzas and fountains and architectural reminders that our histories continually evolve, to become the writer she always wanted to be, to find the "room of one's own," as Woolf would later describe it, but not without horrific and needless tragedy.

Some interesting tidbits about Aleramo after she started her new life: She started it with a vengeance! Like Woolf, she became the most famous feminist in her country and also had a female companion, Lina Poletti, and openly supported homosexual rights. She simultaneously had a relationship with the male writer Giovanni Cena and said she never felt guilty for loving them both at once. That seems remarkably frank for 1900! She was quite attractive to young literary types and, according to the Introduction of my book, "for two generations of young Italian writers, an affair with Sibilla Aleramo was worth, in terms of publicity and reputation, at least a major literary prize." I love that.