SOURCE: "Wooden Nickels for Pinocchio," in Los Angeles Times Book Review, January 27, 1991, pp. 3, 11.

An American critic, Eder received the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism and a 1987 citation for excellence in reviewing from the National Book Critics Circle. In the following, he provides a mixed review of Pinocchio in Venice.

In Pinocchio in Venice, Collodi's boy/puppet has become an elderly art-critic/puppet, winner of two Nobel Prizes in literature. Arriving in Venice at Carnival, he undergoes a series of misadventures roughly equivalent to those of his early days, though far raunchier. They are told in a learnedly witty logorrhea that knocks them askew; like reciting "Ode to a Nightingale" in stage-German.

It is Pinocchio and it is utterly different: a post-structuralist, litcrit demonstration that the language of a narrative does not convey the narrative but the narrator. Robert Coover, in this case.

Coover is not a bad subject; he...