TO ORDER All titles may not be immediately available. . . . . . . . . . . . . RECENT REVIEWS: 4/17/97: Morvern Callar By Alan Warner Fiction 4/16/97: Noam Chomsky By Robert F. Barsky Nonfiction 4/15/97: Serious Business By Stefan Kanfer Nonfiction 4/14/97: Anita and Me By Meera Syal Fiction 4/11/97: Sexplorations By Anka Radakovich Nonfiction . . . . . . . . . . . . SEARCH BOOK ARCHIVES BY: title of book author publisher reviewer ALSO IN SALON: The Lightning Rod In praise of Allen Ginsberg (04/16/97) By Herbert Gold RECENT BOOK FEATURES

p e t r o l i o BY PIER PAOLO PASOLINI | PANTHEON, 470 PAGES BY SCOTT McLEMEE “petrolio" is a mess: a folder's worth of blueprints and a rough draft for the huge novel the author expected would occupy him for a decade, perhaps longer. At the time of his murder in late 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini had been at work on the book for three years -- as a side project while he directed films, wrote poetry and turned out the endless flow of essays and newspaper articles that made him one of the most prominent and scandalous figures in Italian intellectual life. (He was gay and a Communist, and showed an old-fashioned distaste for both consumerism and '60s-style rebellion. Falling into controversy was an old habit.) Pasolini clearly intended "Petrolio" to be his magnum opus. The surviving fragments give some idea of what the finished novel might have looked like. It would have been 2,000 pages long. The closest literary models are those pre-novelistic anthologies or story cycles -- "The Canterbury Tales," "The Decameron" and "The Thousand and One Nights" -- that Pasolini had adapted and directed as films in his "Trilogy of Life." Yet it would also have been as contemporary as the newspaper. The main character, Carlo, is an engineer and a good bourgeois (although for Pasolini, there was actually no such animal); he works for ENI, the Italian state oil company. The book would have been offensive to church and state alike, not least for all the sex, which is plentiful and various. And somewhat confusing: Carlo miraculously changes gender a couple of times. People in the Italian petroleum industry must be relieved to find that Pasolini never managed to incorporate -- as he planned -- "an enormous quantity of historical documents that have some bearing on the events of the book ... in particular, the history of ENI." Despite his polymorphously perverse exploits, Carlo is an unexceptional figure: Pasolini intends him to be a representative mediocrity, a middle-class Italian everyman. In the early pages of the draft he is split (by supernatural forces and/or the narrator) into a "good" Carlo and his evil twin, Karl. Carlo begins as a mildly leftist Catholic -- but his destiny is to end up in the arms, literally and otherwise, of the fascists. 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. Only a reader utterly fascinated by Pasolini's life and work will make it to the end -- which turns out, of course, to be no conclusion at all. "And may the reader forgive me if I annoy him with these matters," he writes early on, "but I am living the genesis of my book." With his death, all that remains is the orderly chaos of a writer's work-in-progress. April 18, 1997 Scott McLemee, a contributing editor at Lingua Franca, also writes regularly for Salon. BOOKMARK: http://www.salonmagazine.com/sneaks/sneak.html