Petrolio

Sobre el libro Petrolio de Pier Paolo Pasolini publicado por New YorkReview of Books al 2026:

Notorious writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolinis final novelvisionary, phenomenally strange, and unfinished at the time of his brutal murdertells 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 Pasolinis brutal death, his sprawling, unfinished magnum opus was published in Italy. Petrolio is an extraordinary display of Pasolinis powers of language and invention. Long suppressed by Pasolinis family, it received the highest critical acclaim while causing public outrage and political scandalproving the authors enduring power to provoke, astonish, and inspire awe.A work in progress at the time of Pasolinis murder, Petrolio is made up of a series of notessome extended and polished narrative passages, others cryptic messages from the author to himself that consist of no more than a few words. At the novels center is Carlo, an oil executive who undergoes a profound personality split: Carlo is a super-Machiavellian power monger Carlo 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 mythOedipus, Medea, the Argonautsand of Dantes hell.The teller of this story is also dual in nature. There is the authorthe external shaper of the novelwho interrupts the text to comment on its mechanics and its meaning. And there is the narrator, whose cynical and seductive perspective comes from within Petrolios 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.