Bøker av Pier Paolo Pasolini

Pasolini's unfinished gem goes from St. Paul to testing the limits of cinematic reality

«In una lettera che spedisce a Livio Garzanti, nel novembre del 1954, Pier Paolo Pasolini spiega con puntualità lo schema del romanzo che sta scrivendo: ¿La mia poetica narrativa consiste nell'incatenare l'attenzione sui dati immediati. E questo mi è possibile perché questi dati immediati trovano la loro collocazione in una struttura o arco narrativo ideale che coincide poi col contenuto morale del romanzo. Tale struttura si potrebbe definire con la formula generale: l'arco del dopoguerra a Roma, dal caos pieno di speranze dei primi giorni della liberazione alla reazione del '50-51¿. Chi legge solo oggi Ragazzi di vita si trova davanti una Roma completamente scomparsa e un'umanità, quella dei rudi ¿borgatari¿, di struggente tenerezza. Il benessere cresce intorno a questi ¿regazzini¿, insieme con la loro fame. Più tardi perfino la fame cambierà di segno, si trasformerà in nuovi bisogni fino ad allora sconosciuti. Il romanzo fu pubblicato da Livio Garzanti nel maggio del 1955, con notevole successo. Al di là del suo valore letterario e nonostante il puntiglioso lavoro di ripulitura dalle ¿parolacce¿ e dalle situazioni più scabrose, il libro fece grande scandalo... La IV sezione del tribunale di Milano celebrò il processo per oltraggio al pudore. Il fango ricoprì il giovane scrittore, e proveniva sia da destra sia da sinistra, con le medesime argomentazioni. Il tribunale, anche grazie alle testimonianze in favore dell'imputato, giurate da Emilio Cecchi, Carlo Bo, Gianfranco Contini, Giuseppe De Robertis, Giancarlo Vigorelli, Anna Banti, Giambattista Vicari, Moravia e altri, lo assolse dall'imputazione. Con il senno di poi si può dire che a far scandalo non fu tanto il lessico forte del libro, ma la dignità letteraria che veniva conferita alla parte più bassa e disonorevole della nostra società, cosa che offendeva i benpensanti e l'idea che essi avevano della letteratura.» Dalla Prefazione di Vincenzo Cerami.

"First published in Italian under the title Teorema by Garzanti Editore"--Title page verso.

"A daring novel, once widely censored, about the scrappy, harrowing, and inventive lives of Rome's unhoused youth by one of Italy's greatest film directors. Boys Alive, published in 1955, was Pier Paolo Pasolini's first novel and remains his best-known work of fiction. He'd moved to Rome a few years before, after finding himself embroiled in a provincial sex scandal, and the impact of the city on Pasolini-its lively, aggressive dialect, its postwar squalor and violence-was accompanied by a new awareness that for him respectability was no longer an option: "Like it or not, I was tarred with the brush of Rimbaud ... or even Oscar Wilde." Urgently looking for teaching work, walk-on parts in films, literary journalism, anything to achieve independence and security, he was drawn to other outcasts who cared nothing for bourgeois values, who lived intensely, carelessly, refusing to be hampered by scruple and convention. This was the context in which he began to work on a novel, and though socialism was the intellectual and artistic fashion of the day and Pasolini was a socialist, his book was completely free of any sentimental or patronizing concern for the plight of the underprivileged. Pasolini revels in the vitality of the squalor he so lavishly and energetically evokes. In Boys Alive, he devotes his native lyricism and vast literary resources to conjuring up an urban inferno as vast and hideous as it is colourful and dynamic. There is no grand plot, but Pasolini's narrative voice moves like a heat-seeking missile, infallibly locking onto situations of great intensity, conflict and comedy. Possessing nothing, his young characters fight to survive and to live. At all costs they must have fun; boredom is death. And if food and fun must be paid for, then money will be found: looting, hustling, scavenging, stealing. Once found it is immediately squandered on sharp clothes and shoes, drunk away, gambled away, or simply lost. Boasting and exhibitionism are the norm, and every boy aspires to be the toughest, the shrewdest, the most unscrupulous punk on the block. As each new episode begins-a warehouse heist, an evening's gambling, a search for sex-the reader can only tremble, waiting for disaster to strike. Everything is up in the air. Nothing is predictable. Tim Parks' new translation of Pasolini's early masterpiece brings out the salt and intelligence of this vital and never less than scandalous work of art"--

Written in response to producer Gastone Ferranti's request for his comments on a set of newsreel items, the poet would respond with a montage of his own. Via the unfolding of a chrysalis of images, in La rabbia (1963), Pasolini's lens pans over Soviet repression in Hungary; the Cuban revolution; (the utopian object of) space exploration; political imprisonment in Algeria; the liberation of the former European colonies; the election of Pope John xxiii; the prospect of revolution in Africa and the Middle East; in Europe and in Latin America... Here, we've a panoply of photorealist intimations. The death of Marilyn Monroe crests as an idea in this tidal pooling of reflections, as the poet's line lights out for conceptual rhymes and counterpoints. In Viti's translation, the weave of prose and poetry that forms La rabbia portrays the vitality of Pasolini's work in its capacity to speak to both the specifics of his contexts, the character of our own present tense, and the ironic fact of a life lived against the gulf of discontent in its myriad forms. Here, we've a startling confrontation of a revolutionary struggle in stasis set in lines that crystallise in a rallying call against blindness. Alongside a first, unabridged English language translation of Pasolini's 'Sequences,' the Tenement Press publication of La rabbia also includes an introduction by Roberto Chiesi (cultural director of the Centro Studi-Archivio Pier Paolo Pasolini, Cineteca di Bologna), and an afterword by storyteller, novelist, essayist, and screenwriter, John Berger.

Most people outside Italy know Pier Paolo Pasolini for his films, many of which began as literary works - Arabian Nights, The Gospel According to Matthew, and The Canterbury Tales among them. The author presents poems from every period of Pasolini's poetic oeuvre. In doing so, he gives readers a more complete picture of the poet.

In Danger reveals the literary life of internationally renowned filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini.