Pinocchio Universe

A poor carpenter is handed a piece of firewood that screams when he cuts into it, and passes it along to a friend, who carves it into a boy. What Geppetto makes is not a sweet child. Pinocchio lies, bolts, sells his schoolbook, kills a talking cricket with a hammer, is hanged from an oak tree by two confidence men, and has to be dragged back toward being human by a fairy with rather more patience than he has earned. Carlo Collodi serialised it in the 1880s and it has never stopped being rewritten. Here the original sits with its offshoots: the American continuation Pinocchio Under the Sea, early illustrated abridgements made for children, and modern reworkings — Wooden Bones, which asks what a boy who can animate wood grows up to do with that, and The Swallowed Man, narrated by Geppetto from inside the fish. Collodi's book is stranger and crueller than the cartoon. It was written to frighten children into behaving, and the sentiment arrives late and is not cheap when it does. Start with Pinocchio itself in a full translation rather than an abridgement — the chapters usually cut are the ones that make the ending mean anything — and take the retellings afterwards, as arguments with it.