{"product_id":"petrolio-isbn-9798896230304","title":"Petrolio","description":"\u003cb\u003eNotorious 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.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eSeventeen years after Pier Paolo Pasolini’s brutal death, his sprawling, unfinished magnum opus was published in Italy. \u003ci\u003ePetrolio\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eA work in progress at the time of Pasolini’s murder, \u003ci\u003ePetrolio\u003c\/i\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThe 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 \u003ci\u003ePetrolio\u003c\/i\u003e’s fictional world.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eFragmentary, 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, \u003ci\u003ePetrolio\u003c\/i\u003e is a postmodern masterpiece.“With shifts from social realism to wild fabulation, sustained allusions to a half-dozen works of literature, and the numerous short essays scattered throughout the text, \u003ci\u003ePetrolio \u003c\/i\u003eis the work of a writer confident he can turn his manuscript into a kind of encyclopedic novel. All he needed was time. The surviving cluster of sketches and fragments is, by turns, brilliant and almost unreadable.” — Scott McLemee, \u003ci\u003eSalon\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“A trove of searingly beautiful apercus and images, a caustic compendium of this modern-day Jeremiah's last thoughts on class, anthropology, sex, psychoanalysis and male hairstyles.\u003ci\u003e Petrolio\u003c\/i\u003e reveals its author as the grateful possessor of a Mediterranean culture stretching from Homer through Apollonius of Tyana and Petronius, and on to Dante and Leopardi — a salty humanistic tradition to which Pasolini, chaser of slum boys, lover of flashy sports cars, castigator of the powerful, was the fitting heir.” — Fernanda Eberstadt, \u003ci\u003eThe New York Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Translator Ann Goldstein was heroic in her herculean undertaking” — George Armstrong, \u003ci\u003eThe Los Angeles Times\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003ci\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003ePetrolio\u003c\/i\u003e recoils from the linearity of a text written \"a schidionata,\" like the meat speared and cooked on a skewer… Instead, the novel is composed \"a brulichio\" as it strives to attain the churning and amorphous configuration of a teeming mass\u003ci\u003e.\u003c\/i\u003e” — Deborah Amberson, \u003ci\u003eQuaderni d'italianistica\u003c\/i\u003e\u003cb\u003ePier Paolo Pasolini\u003c\/b\u003e (1922–1975) published his debut novel, \u003ci\u003eBoys Alive\u003c\/i\u003e, 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 \u003ci\u003eLe Notti di Cabiria \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eLa Dolce Vita\u003c\/i\u003e and directing films such as \u003ci\u003eThe Gospel According to Saint Matthew\u003c\/i\u003e, \u003ci\u003eThe Hawks and the Sparrows\u003c\/i\u003e, and \u003ci\u003eTheorem\u003c\/i\u003e,  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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAnn Goldstein\u003c\/b\u003e 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAndré Naffis-Sahely\u003c\/b\u003e is the author of two collections of poetry, \u003ci\u003eThe Promised Land: Poems from an Itinerant Life \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eHigh Desert\u003c\/i\u003e, as well as the editor of \u003ci\u003eThe Heart of a Stranger: An Anthology of Exile Literature\u003c\/i\u003e. 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.","brand":"NYRB Classics","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48233472557285,"sku":"NP9798896230304","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9798896230304.jpg?v=1767734707","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/products\/petrolio-isbn-9798896230304","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}