Which isn't to say that the book is depressing. This is a place driven by hunger, brutality, greed and social injustice. This lack of sentimentality runs through the book, whose sense of reality reflects the harshness of life in Collodi's Tuscany. There is a talking cricket, but it's not named Jiminy, doesn't wear a top hat, and gets squished by Pinocchio 12 pages in when it tries to give him advice. Gepetto isn't a kindly old man - he's hot-tempered and grindingly poor.
Yet for all these familiar things, Collodi's book is, from the beginning, a very different - and much wilder - experience. Along the way, he gets suckered by a scheming fox and cat, goes to a seductive toy land where boys are turned into donkeys and gets swallowed by an enormous fish. Pinocchio is a puppet, fashioned in the workshop of the craftsman Gepetto, who has adventures that turn him into a real boy. Now, the rudiments of Collodi's tale are similar to what most of us remember from the movie. Everything I knew about Pinocchio had come from the 1939 Disney cartoon that I saw as a kid and still love today. Although the story of the puppet-boy is part of our modern mythology, like Peter Pan or The Wizard of Oz, I soon realized that I didn't have a clue what was in the 1881 original. I thought about this when I picked up Geoffrey Brock's brisk new translation of Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio. Walking through the park, he points out that much of Disney's work is derived from dark, subversive writers like Lewis Carroll, Mark Twain and the Brothers Grimm - but that his movies and rides erase all the darkness and subversion Disney turns their stories into sentimental lies. Doctorow's novel The Book of Daniel, its alienated young hero goes to Disneyland.