If the film is unsettling, consider the novel it was based on, Carlo Collodi’s “Adventures of Pinocchio” (1883). The tale begins with a lethal weapon: under blows from an axe, the pine log that will become Pinocchio cries out, “Ouch! you’ve hurt me!” Soon afterward, the woodworker Geppetto starts fashioning the log into a puppet, which he calls Pinocchio: pino, in Italian, meaning pine, and occhio, meaning eye, one of the first parts of Pinocchio that Geppetto liberates from within the log. Next comes the nose, which, the moment Geppetto has finished it, starts to grow to an enormous length. Geppetto tries to prune it back, “but the more he cut and shortened it, the longer that impudent nose became.” This nose will become Pinocchio’s trademark feature, and the combined comedy and cruelty that attend its birth can be said to stand for Collodi’s novel as a whole: Geppetto got Pinocchio by cutting, and for most of the remainder of the tale Pinocchio cuts him—mocks him, runs away from him.
But, as with Horowitz’s earlier two Bond novels, this is popular fiction at its most accomplished, purring along with the sleek assurance of an Aston Martin. All the ingredients of a cracking spy story are present, from the smooth, dastardly villain, Colonel Boris – a dig at our prime minister? – who is said to be “the high priest of an evil religion” and practises mind control on his unfortunate victims, to the young Russian agent Katya Leonova, who has “something of the young Jean Seberg about her face... [and is] far too beautiful for the uniform she has chosen”. She might sneer of Bond that he is “extroverted, highly self-opinionated and borderline psychotic”, but such things are seldom a bar to a union in these tales, and so it proves here.
Since bursting on the scene with the runaway hit “A Time to Kill” in 1989, John Grisham has been one of the most reliable fiction writers alive, churning out a bestselling novel almost every year. But like the best pitchers in Grisham’s beloved sport of baseball, sometimes you just want to throw a change-up. Enter “Sparring Partners, a collection of three novellas with almost nothing in common. Yes, they’re all about some aspect of the law — the people who practice it or the people who run afoul of it. But that’s the only thing that groups them together.
As in the real world, when the landscape turns bizarre, Walter’s characters attempt to interpret, catalogue, control, and even eradicate it, to no avail. Slowly, like the walking group in ‘Conglomerate’, we realise that something terrible is going on in the natural world. But we are, of course, too late, and the land is done with us. ‘Do you see now?’ it demands. ‘Nothing is fine and there is nowhere that you can hide.’
Ann de Forest’s new anthology, Ways of Walking, takes a different path. It gives the reader a prismatic sense of this basic human activity by tapping into 26 distinct examples of humanity, each with their own concerns, physicality and gender, ties to landscape and sense of history, unique focus and powers of observation, levels of sensual participation, ecological and social perceptions, and level of literary aspiration. This is no soliloquy; it triumphs as a many-sided conversation. And deviating from the flâneur’s Great Cities — New York, Paris — many of these essays center on Philadelphia, that slightly invisible father of American cities, though the voices here also report from the Chilean jungle, the mountains of Appalachia, and the uneven stones of the Appian Way. The successive essays form a palimpsest of landscapes, histories, questions, and bodies, an exploration of the most basic means of human locomotion.
There’s something electrifying about encountering a long-dead author who somehow diagnoses your own predicament perfectly. It’s a feeling that the historian Aaron Sachs explores in his excellent new work, Up From the Depths: Herman Melville, Lewis Mumford, and Rediscovery in Dark Times. The book is a braided account of Melville and Mumford, aimed at exploring the strange resonance between their times and ours. It asks, with unusual directness: What’s the point of the past?
As the daughter of Broadway star Joel Grey, Jennifer Grey caught the acting bug early, at age 6. That’s when her father originated the role of the slick, menacing Master of Ceremonies in “Cabaret” onstage, in 1966. As Jennifer Grey writes in her keenly observed memoir, “Out of the Corner,” her Saturday treat was to sit in his dressing room while he transformed himself with false eyelashes, lip pencil and Dippity-do gel.
“Every one of his features was reinvented from scratch,” she writes. “This self-drawn mask blotted out any trace of my dad as I knew him.”
Those admiring words haunt the rest of her story, because Grey’s own arc of celebrity has been famously complicated by the reinvention, so to speak, of her own features.