PINOCCHIO: THE TALE OF A PUPPET by Carlo Collodi

When it came to this year’s Back to the Classics Challenge, the one that really stumped me was the “Animal” category. My immediate thought was to include a classic children’s book in that slot, since kids and animals seem to go together. But it wasn’t as easy as you’d think. I didn’t want to do a re-read, so Charlotte’s Web and Call of the Wild were out. And I didn’t want to read something that was going to make me cry, so forget Old Yeller or Black Beauty. In desperation, I turned to goodreads.com and found an unlikely list: “Best Anthropomorphic Animal Books." (Random, don’t you think? I am beginning to think there’s a goodreads list for everything!) And that’s why I whittled away (sorry I couldn’t resist) a couple of hours with this children’s classic last month.

Those who like me haven’t read Carlo Collodi’s original story of the marionette who comes to life might be surprised at how closely the folks at Disney actually followed the original Pinocchio. There are differences, of course, but the bulk of the plot was the same. As you might expect, the original is way more violent than the Disney version -- Pinocchio manages to kill the conscientious cricket who was later renamed Jiminy by folks at Disney during their first meeting, for example. Strangely, the original is also way preachier than the Disney version, with constant lessons about young boys’ behavior.

I guess the biggest surprise for me was that Pinocchio is a lot less likeable as a character in the original version of the story. He’s no sooner sentient than he’s jeering and rude to poor Gepetto. The innocent quality of the Disney version was entirely lacking. Pinocchio isn’t led off the straight and narrow because of bad company in Collodi’s story; his flaws appear to be innate. I found that such an interesting take on the nature of children. Are they inherently innocent and needing to be protected, or are they inherently bad and needing to be brought to heel?

For example, toward the end of the book, Pinocchio’s bad behavior causes him “donkey fever,” and his kind friend the Marmot has to tell him the sad truth about what has happened to him:

”My dear boy,” said the Marmot, by way of consoling him, “you can do nothing. It is destiny. It is written in the decrees of wisdom that all boys who are lazy, and who take a dislike to books, to schools, and to masters, and who pass their time in amusement, games, and diversions, must end sooner or later by becoming transformed into so many little donkeys.” Kindle location 1265 of 1637

I actually enjoyed reading Collodi’s Pinocchio, but here’s the thing: I’m not sure that the average 21st Century parent would relish reading the original version of this classic to their children. Yes, there is ultimately a happy ending, but that comes through Pinocchio learning the difficult lessons of self-denial and obedience -- and those things seem somehow woefully out of fashion today. Cleverness and individuality and most other values that contemporary children’s book authors focus on are entirely absent in Collodi’s tale. But that may be too bad, because thrift and selflessness are still powerful values for children to emulate. In fact, they may be increasingly important values for the generation of kids who need to deal with problems like global warming and the knowledge gap. Maybe there’s a place for another interpretation of the tale, minus the corporal punishment and violence, but more in keeping with the redemptive nature of work, from Collodi’s perspective?

So that’s the fifth book for the Back to the Classics Challenge, and number 5 on my Classics Club list. And the good news is that I have the last book read, so that review will be coming tomorrow, meaning I will at least finish the one Challenge I joined this year! Pinocchio: The Tale of a Puppet (translated by Alice Carsey) was available as a free Kindle title, so the cost of the challenge after 5 books remains $12.29 -- or about $2.46 per title. Thanks to Sarah Reads Too Much and the Classics Club crew for hosting the 2013 challenge! I'm looking forward to participating in 2014 when it will be hosted by Karen at Books and Chocolate.

THE BIG CLOCK by Kenneth Fearing

A murder investigation in which the investigator already believes he knows who the murderer is – and yet realizes he himself is being framed for the crime. He has to keep the investigation going long enough to reveal the murderer before the murderer realizes he was recognized. That is the taut, electrifying premise of Ken Fearing’s noir NYRB Classic The Big Clock.

George Stroud, editor of Crimeways magazine, is not a nice person. Despite the fact he has a sweet wife and an adorable kid (both nicknamed “George”), he begins a casual affair with his boss’ girlfriend, Pauline. After dropping her off from a clandestine weekend, he spies his boss following her up the stairs to her apartment. Two days later the cleaning lady finds she’s been murdered. George’s boss, publishing mogul Earl Janoth, tasks George with tracking down the killer – but all clues lead back to Pauline’s lover, who just happens to be George. The rest of the book is a study in tension, as George follows the steps that will inevitably lead to revealing himself as Pauline’s lover, thereby destroying his home life, his job, and quite possibly his life, if Janoth is the real killer.

I looked out the windows myself. There was a lot of territory out there. A nation within a nation. If I picked the right kind of a staff, twisted the investigation where I could, jammed it where I had to, pushed it hard where it was safe, it might be a very, very, very long time before they found George Stroud. p. 90

This short novel, told through multiple narrators who sound like witnesses giving testimony, really packs a punch. It’s fun to watch George, the sleazy philanderer who thought he covered his tracks so well, come to realize how easy his actions were to trace. Part of the giveaway comes in George’s peculiar taste in art, which was fine. But I really didn’t get why Fearing included the perspective of the artist in the novel. I thought it confused a very tight plot.

It’s easy to see why this is a noir classic, however, and a perfect choice for both the R.I.P. VIII Challenge and the Classics Club. That makes four for this season’s R.I.P. Challenge, but I’m still hoping to review one more before the week is out! Thanks so much to Carl V. for hosting! This is the first of the NYRB Classics on my Classics Club List I have gotten to, and I am happy I have so many of these once out-of-print titles on my TBR pile. They add an element of mental detective work to my reading, wondering why they went out of fashion in the first place.

FTC Statement: I did not receive a copy of this book for review. I borrowed it from the library. That brings my Classic Club average cost per book down to $3.07!

THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD by Zora Neale Hurston

I was completely taken in from the first page of Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God. And yet I’ve struggled with this review because I just can’t seem to put the book into words. So maybe it will be easier to put it into one word: voluptuous. I have never read a novel that appealed so viscerally to my senses.

She was stretched on her back beneath the pear tree soaking in the alto chant of the visiting bees, the gold of the sun and the panting breath of the breeze when the inaudible voice of it all came to her. She saw a dust-bearing bee sink into the sanctum of a bloom; the thousand sister-calyxes arch to meet the love embrace and the ecstatic shiver of the tree from root to tiniest branch creaming in every blossom and frothing with delight. So this was a marriage! She had been summoned to behold a revelation. Then Janie felt a pain remorseless sweet that left her limp and languid. p. 13

That’s pretty heady stuff for a walk in the woods!

A member of the Harlem Renaissance movement, Hurston attempted to capture a microcosm of the post-Civil War experience of African-American women with Their Eyes Were Watching God. The book begins with Janie Crawford, a beautiful teenager, awakening to the sensuousness of the South in springtime. Her grandmother panics at her first kiss, fearing she will go down the path of the mother who had and then abandoned Janie, and so she marries her off to a secure but boring local farmer. Janie’s personality can’t be contained, however, and she walks off the farm one day with Jody, a man she believes will lead her to adventure. He brings Janie to one of the newly-built African-American towns in Central Florida, and quickly becomes the town’s mayor. But Janie finds out that having money and prestige is very different from having happiness.

Still, Janie’s disappointing marriage to Jody eventually leaves her a young, rich widow. And her independence gives her something she’s never had: choices. When she meets Teacake, a guitar-playing gambler, she experiences the “springtime” she remembers from her youth. Because she owns a home she can choose to leave it. Because she has lived conventionally she can choose to flout convention. Janie’s self-actualization becomes an allegory for the Harlem Renaissance itself, ready to break free from the constraints of white society and create something truly unique and beautiful on its own.

I’m sorry it took me so long to get this review up – it would have been a perfect choice for Banned Book Week, and I wholeheartedly recommend it to anyone looking for a great Harlem Renaissance title. It is partially written to capture the Southern African-American vernacular of the time, and that slowed down my reading a bit at times, but it didn’t detract at all from my enjoyment: it just made me focus. One thing I found personally captivating was the book’s location. I lived in Gainesville, Florida, for six years, so I had an easy time imagining the wild lushness of rural central Florida and its small, isolated little towns. I would encourage all lovers of literary fiction to read this book. Southern literature enthusiasts and classic romance readers would enjoy it as well. It spans so many boundaries: humorous but heartbreaking, classic but out of the ordinary, ancient but totally fresh.

What a fantastic Classics Club title! I can’t figure out how Their Eyes Were Watching God was a completely new title to me – I saw it on the ALA’s list of Banned and Challenged Classics and couldn’t remember ever having heard about it. But a quick look at the synopsis told me I’d found a title that fit the African-American Experience Classic for the Back to the Classics Challenge – and the story looked compelling to boot. So I plonked down the whopping $9.78 cost of the Kindle edition and got to work (for anyone keeping count, that’s $12.29 for my Classics Club reading so far, for an average of about $4.10 per title). I’m quite sure this going to be one of my favorite books of the year, so it was more than worth the cost of the e-book. And both of those challenges are happily on track! Next up – two classics that fit into the RIP Challenge coming soon!

LADY AUDLEY'S SECRET by M.E. Braddon

When I joined The Classics Club, the first thing I did was go through the list on Kindle, to see which of the books were available for free or reduced fees. This is one of the great things about reading classics—many of those in the public domain are available at no cost for e-readers through the volunteers at Project Gutenberg. I figured I would load a couple of Kindle titles immediately so I didn’t waste any late night reading time, which is when I really enjoy using my Kindle. And one of the first items I loaded was M.E. Braddon’s Lady Audley’s Secret. Lucky for me, a night of insomnia led me to yet another unexpectedly enjoyable classic!

Lady Audley’s Secret is often described as the quintessential Victorian “sensation” novel, providing a glimpse into that tightly ordered world by examining what happens when its conventions are completely abandoned. The novel begins with the poor but beautiful Lucy Graham winning the heart of widower Lord Michael Audley. Formerly employed by the local doctor as a governess, Lucy’s life before coming to Essex is veiled in some sad mystery. Lord Audley adores spoiling his young and charming wife, hoping to make up for her past unhappiness, to the disgust of his own daughter Alicia (who happens to be about the same age as her new stepmother).

Meanwhile, back in London, presumptive heir to Lord Audley’s title barrister Robert Audley runs into a dear old friend, George Talboys, just richly returned from a gold-panning expedition to Australia, who is searching for the young and beautiful wife he abandoned in an attempt to change their dwindling fortunes. The fortunes were dwindling, I might add, because George’s father disinherited his son when he rashly chose to marry the beautiful but penniless Helen. Alas, just as George triumphantly returns to England, her death is announced in the papers, breaking his heart. But fate brings the many threads of the story together at Audley Court – until, of course, George Talboys mysteriously vanishes, and Robert is compelled to find out the meaning of his friend’s disappearance – no matter the cost to his beloved family.

I like to think of it as the Grandmother of every radio serial and soap opera ever produced –many of the motifs that pack this 300 page novel are still playing out on the airwaves and Internet today: revenge, doppelgangers, orphaned children, unscrupulous parents. I read that it was originally printed in installments, which explains why each chapter adds some information about Lucy’s past – and ends in some kind of cliffhanger. Reading it all together makes for quite a rollercoaster. The seven deadly sins get quite a workout in Lady Audley’s Secret, but as you’d expect from a Victorian novel, the heavenly virtues are also in evidence, drawing a very clear delineation of those who live within society’s boundaries, and those who live without. There’s also a healthy dose of the occult. For example, Alicia’s dog seems to have a preternatural fear of the new Lady Audley:

The Newfoundland rolled his eyes slowly round in the direction of the speaker, as if he understood every word that had been said. Lady Audley happened to enter the room at this very moment, and the animal cowered down by the side of his mistress with a suppressed grow. There was something in the manner of the dog which was, if anything, more indicative of terror than of fury; incredible as it appears that Caesar should be frightened by so fragile a creature as Lucy Audley.p. 72

I thoroughly enjoyed every frothy, overwrought minute of this novel. It was so true to its time period, yet edgy in its confrontation of social taboos. I had never even heard of Lady Audley’s Secret until, trying to expand beyond Elizabeth Gaskill, I looked up a list of female Victorian authors and found Mary Elizabeth (M.E.) Braddon. The book also appeared on the Manchester Guardian’s 1000 Books Everyone Must Read: The Definitive List. That’s a pretty bold claim for any list, and I certainly found some striking omissions (not surprisingly, the list is very English-centric), but I think it’s a fabulous resource, conveniently broken up into genre: comedy, crime, family and self, love, science fiction and fantasy, state of the nation, and war and travel. I will definitely be culling this list for more ideas for future challenges, as the recommendations so far have been outstanding.

This book counts as my 19th Century Classic for the Back to the Classics Challenge, hosted by Sarah Reads Too Much, and is my second book for The Classics Club. It was free for my Kindle, which keeps my total for that Challenge so far at $2.51. Since this is considered a crime genre classic, I am also linking it to the R.I.P. VIII Challenge, hosted by Carl V. of Stainless Steel Droppings, which started just a little bit early this year.