La fabbrica di Pinocchio. Dalla fiaba all'illustrazione, l'immaginario di Collodi by Veronica Bonanni (review)

ID:p0555 his hat to the linguistic convention of Arabic that conceived of numbers like 1001 and 101 as stand-ins for an inexhaustibility of the infinite, Marzolph’s book retains the mysterious magic of the tales themselves, such that his collection becomes a garden of forking paths and unexpected pleasures. Marzolph’s book shares this quality with the best reference works that introduce the reader to new places to look, research, and find lost connections that may delight our friends, colleagues, and ourselves. This extremely erudite volume is the product of a lifetime of devotion to the field of comparative folk narrative research. The book is a trove of potential sources, methodologies, perspectives, and insights for specialist readers, which are the byways for future research. In a broader sense, each of the essays succeeds not only in delineating the “extent to which the West is indebted to the Muslim World” but, perhaps more significantly, it shows the “common features” that the West has shared with the Muslim tradition (3). For classroom teachers, one example of the kinds of passages from East to West drawn from the many case studies in this book would suffice to demonstrate the folly of nationalist scholarships. We can only hope that modern-day students are as lucky as Walpole was to encounter some of the inherited wisdom of these “silly” stories from long ago and far away. Maurice