Petrolio

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.