Real Life

A pair of novels from Pier Paolo Pasolini, recently reissued by New York Review Books, display the aesthetic and intellectual range of the Italian writer and filmmaker. The first, his debut, Boys Alive, published in 1955, is a fizzing chemical reaction, its postwar hustler vignettes suffused with speed, lust and disaster. The second, his final work in prose, Theorem (1968), is a chilly, enigmatic parable about a visitor who seduces each member of a bourgeois family and thereby transforms or destroys them. (It began as a poem and was later made into a film of the same name.) Between these two approaches we find tradition distilled and then discarded, moving from gritty Italian neo-realism toward the abstraction of the then-ascendant nouveau roman. Pasolini built upon his literary inheritance before utterly razing it such that neither nostalgia nor mythology could gain a footing. Reading the novels back-to-back is like a cold plunge after a scalding bath.