The Swallowed Man

August 10, 2020
British writer and illustrator Carey (Little) brings his grotesque whimsy to this lackluster retelling of a harrowing episode from Carlo Collodi’s The Adventures of Pinocchio. The story begins with Giuseppe Lorenzini having been swallowed by a giant sharklike creature. Giuseppe, who had been sailing the seas looking for his runaway wooden son, Pinocchio, takes up residence in the monster’s abdomen, finding refuge in a Danish ship the fish has also ingested. Thus sheltered and supplied (with food, drink, candles, and ink), he composes his autobiography, attempts some new carving projects, and, as time passes, succumbs to hallucinatory fits of madness. The humble craftsman is an orotund narrator, holding forth from the belly of the beast in high rhetorical style: “I am a monarch of space. Emperor of Inner Sharkland.” Some of Collodi’s famous scenes (burning feet, growing nose) are briefly replayed, but the narrative is mostly devoted to Giuseppe’s backstory, including tepid accounts of the women he loved, and to his Crusoe-like survival strategy. In the most interesting sections, Carey dives into Giuseppe’s strained relationship with his own father that presages his tempestuous relationship with the impish Pinocchio, but these moments are few and far between. The book feels both slight and overstuffed, a prolonged exercise in style that brings little insight into Collodi’s classic.

September 1, 2020
Known for his eccentric character studies infused with imaginative illustrations, Carey follows Little (2018) with a reimagining of Collodi's Pinocchio from the point of view of Geppetto as he languishes inside the belly of a whale. Writing in a journal discovered in the Captain's cabin of a schooner residing inside the monstrous leviathan, Giuseppe "Geppetto" Lorenzini records the events that led to his undersea captivity. The journal describes a lonely carpenter who decides to create an articulated doll for mercenary gain, but as he crafts the marionette, it comes to life, causing him great distress and soon, the puppet runs away. When the wooden boy fails to return, Geppetto sets out to find him and seek forgiveness, only to end up inside the mammoth colossus where he now resides. He seeks solace by drawing and chronicling his misspent youth under a stern father and encounters with various women, hoping the account might reach his son. No Disney fairy tale, this is an illustrated, literary, poignantly erudite study in anguish, guilt, madness, soul-searching, and eventual redemption.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)

October 15, 2020
A retelling of Pinocchio from Geppetto's point of view. The novel purports to be the memoirs of Geppetto, a carpenter from the town of Collodi, written in the belly of a vast fish that has swallowed him. Fortunately for Geppetto, the fish has also engulfed a ship, and its supplies--fresh water, candles, hardtack, captain's logbook, ink--are what keep the Swallowed Man going. (Collodi is, of course, the name of the author of the original Pinocchio.) A misfit whose loneliness is equaled only by his drive to make art, Geppetto scours his surroundings for supplies, crafting sculptures out of pieces of the ship's wood, softened hardtack, mussel shells, and his own hair, half hoping and half fearing to create a companion once again that will come to life. He befriends a crab that lives all too briefly in his beard, then mourns when "she" dies. Alone in the dark, he broods over his past, reflecting on his strained relationship with his father and his harsh treatment of his own "son"--Pinocchio, the wooden puppet that somehow came to life. In true Carey fashion, the author illustrates the novel with his own images of his protagonist's art: sketches of Pinocchio, of woodworking tools, of the women Geppetto loved; photos of driftwood, of tintypes, of a sculpted self-portrait with seaweed hair. For all its humor, the novel is dark and claustrophobic, and its true subject is the responsibilities of creators. Remembering the first time he heard of the sea monster that was to swallow him, Geppetto wonders if the monster is somehow connected to Pinocchio: "The unnatural child had so thrown the world off-balance that it must be righted at any cost, and perhaps the only thing with the power to right it was a gigantic sea monster, born--I began to suppose this--just after I cracked the world by making a wooden person." Later, contemplating his self-portrait bust, Geppetto asks, "Monster of the deep. Am I, then, the monster? Do I nightmare myself?" A deep and grimly whimsical exploration of what it means to be a son, a father, and an artist.

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