Enzo Siciliano - Pasolini, A Biography

Beschrijving boek

Translated from the italian by John Shepley. 

Enzo Siciliano’s Pasolini is the definitive biography of the man Susan Sontag has called ‘indisputably the most remarkable figure to have emerged in Italian arts and letters since the Second World War’. Known in America primarily as a film maker, Pasolini was also a prodigiously gifted poet, novelist and literary and social critic, a modern-day Renaissance man who in his life and work embodied the artistic, political, religious and sexual upheaval of contemporary European society.

Pasolini’s battered body was found on a deserted field outside Rome on November 2, 1975. He had been murdered by a homosexual prostitute, but the possibility exists that the boy had not acted alone, that Pasolini’s murder was politically motivated.

Pasolini’s life and death are inextricably involved with the highly charged political atmosphere of post-war Italy, and in many ways he can be seen as embodying the contradictions of his many-faceted, fragmented society. His mother came from the Friuli region, near the Austrian border, his father was a Fascist army officer. He first earned national attention as a gifted poet trying to resolve Christian and Marxist ideology; later, he made his own homosexuality a subject of his poetry, and in two famous novels, which made him a figure of widespread scandal, explored the rough world of Roman underclass youth. In the sixties he began making movies [The Gospel According to Saint Matthew, Teorema, The Decameron, The Canterbury Tales, Arabian Nights, Salò]. Pasolini later became a widely read commentator on the hypocrisies and failings of Italian political and cultural life, a role which brought him many fervent supporters and just as fervent enemies.

Enzo Siciliano’s sympathetic and critically acute study discusses every aspect of Pasolini’s life and work: his difficult early years and first homosexual experiences; his ground-breaking poems and novels; the literary and political controversies, the scandals and court trials that attended Pasolini’s work throughout his career; his love affairs; his friendships with Alberto Moravia, Elsa Morante, Maria Callas and many others; his internationally acclaimed and embattled career as a film maker; his growing intellectual and personal despair. What emerges is not only the story of a great and troubled artist, but the portrait of an entire culture in turmoil.