Petrolio

“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, Petrolio is 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, Salon

“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. Petrolio 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, The New York Times

“Translator Ann Goldstein was heroic in her herculean undertaking” — George Armstrong, The Los Angeles Times

“Petrolio 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.” — Deborah Amberson, Quaderni d'italianistica

“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, Petrolio is 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, Salon

“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. Petrolio 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, The New York Times

“Translator Ann Goldstein was heroic in her herculean undertaking” — George Armstrong, The Los Angeles Times

“Petrolio 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.” — Deborah Amberson, Quaderni d'italianistica