Notorious writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final novel--visionary, phenomenally strange, and unfinished at the time of his brutal murder--tells a fragmentary and characteristically provocative story of an oil executive split between the desire to dominate and the desire to be dominated. Seventeen years after Pier Paolo Pasolini’s brutal death, his sprawling, unfinished magnum opus was published in Italy. A work in progress at the time of Pasolini’s murder, The teller of this story is also dual in nature. There is the author--the external shaper of the novel--who interrupts the text to comment on its mechanics and its meaning. And there is the narrator, whose cynical and seductive perspective comes from within Fragmentary, deliberately self-referential, meta-literary, a devotional exploration of the male libido, an ode to the lust for power and the power of lust and, above all, a wrenching attempt to define the intellectual and his responsibilities,

Autorentext
Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922–1975) published his debut novel, Boys Alive, in 1955. It was hailed as a masterpiece by prominent Italian writers and condemned as pornographic by Marxist critics and the conservative judiciary of Milan. In the decades that followed, he published many more novels, books of poetry, essays, and plays. He also became a screenwriter and filmmaker, collaborating with Federico Fellini on Le Notti di Cabiria and La Dolce Vita and directing films such as The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, The Hawks and the Sparrows, and Theorem, which Pasolini had first published as a novel earlier the same year. A figure of controversy due to his antiestablishment political views and homosexuality, he was brought to trial at least thirty-three times. He was brutally murdered under mysterious circumstances on the beach in Ostia, on the outskirts of Rome.

Ann Goldstein is an editor and translator from the Italian language. Best known for her translations of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Quartet, she has also translated works by Primo Levi, Elsa Morante, Donatella Di Pietrantonio, and Alba de Céspedes, among others.

André Naffis-Sahely is the author of two collections of poetry, The Promised Land: Poems from an Itinerant Life and High Desert, as well as the editor of The Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature. He has translated works by Honoré de Balzac, Émile Zola, Tahar Ben Jelloun, Abdellatif Laâbi, Rachid Boudjedra, Ribka Sibhatu and Fabio Franzin. He is Assistant Professor of English, French and Italian at the University of California, Davis, where he also teaches on the MFA Program in Creative Writing.

Klappentext

Notorious writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini’s final novel—visionary, phenomenally strange, and unfinished at the time of his brutal murder—tells a fragmentary and characteristically provocative story of an oil executive split between the desire to dominate and the desire to be dominated.

Seventeen years after Pier Paolo Pasolini’s brutal death, his sprawling, unfinished magnum opus was published in Italy. Petrolio is an extraordinary display of Pasolini’s powers of language and invention. Long suppressed by Pasolini’s family, it received the highest critical acclaim while causing public outrage and political scandal—proving the author’s enduring power to provoke, astonish, and inspire awe.

A work in progress at the time of Pasolini’s murder, Petrolio is made up of a series of notes—some extended and polished narrative passages, others cryptic messages from the author to himself that consist of no more than a few words. At the novel’s center is Carlo, an oil executive who undergoes a profound personality split: Carlo 1 is a super-Machiavellian power monger; Carlo 2 lives only to satisfy his perverse and insatiable sexual desires. Carlo also experiences a sexual metamorphosis in which he becomes, at will, female. The story of Carlo is interspersed with revisions of myth—Oedipus, Medea, the Argonauts—and of Dante’s hell.

The teller of this story is also dual in nature. There is the author—the external shaper of the novel—who interrupts the text to comment on its mechanics and its meaning. And there is the narrator, whose cynical and seductive perspective comes from within Petrolio’s fictional world.

Fragmentary, deliberately self-referential, meta-literary, a devotional exploration of the male libido, an ode to the lust for power and the power of lust and, above all, a wrenching attempt to define the intellectual and his responsibilities, Petrolio is a postmodern masterpiece.