"On a winter evening of the year 19--, after arduous travels across two continents and as may centuries, pursued by harsh weathr and threatened with worse, an aging emeritus professor from an American university, burdened with illness, jet lag, great misgivings, and an excess of luggage, eases himself and his encumbrances down from his carriage onto a railway platform in what many hold to be the most magical city in the world..."

So begins Robert Coover's masterful new novel, Pinocchio in Venice, a book that is at once a dazzling tour de force and a delightful, lovingly wicked companion volume to the original Pinocchio story adored by so many millions of children and adults, C. Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio.

Coover's hero is now a very old man, a scholar and aesthete who learned all his civilizing lessons well and who has now returned to Italy, his homeland, and to Venice, the city that shaped him -his "roots", if you will - there to complete his final great tribute to the Blue-Haired Fairy, his magnum opus, called simply Mamma. He is looking for the closing image. He will find it, or it will find him, in the climactic Carnivalesque chapters. By then, he will have propelled himself into an ironic and often painful replay of all the follies of the original story. Worse, he is turning, slowly but surely, back into wood. The flesh is falling away; the puppet within is in ruins.

The result is a brilliant philosophical discourse on what it means to be human; a hilarious and bawdy slapstick adventure, in the best commedia dell'arte tradition, that brings to life all Pinocchio's old friendsand enemies; and, lastly, a fitting tribute to the glorious history and grandeur, as well as the woeful decay, of Venice itself. Pinocchio in Venice represents Coover at his finest.