The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Petrolio by Pier Paolo Pasolini
Thomas Hove

Pier Paolo Pasolini. Petrolio. Trans. Ann Goldstein. Pantheon, 1997. 470pp. $27.00.

Pasolini claimed in a 1975 interview that this projected novel would serve as “a kind of ‘summa’ of all my experiences, all my memories.” First conceived in 1972, it tells the story of an Italian bourgeois man, Carlo Valletti, who splits into two selves. Carlo I rises to power as an engineer for ENI, the Italian state oil-and-gas company; Carlo II (“Karl”) pursues various forms of sexual pleasure and eventually transforms into a woman. But calling Petrolio (“Oil”) a novel, or even a narrative, is highly problematic. Even more so than such canonical unfinished works as Billy Budd, Felix Krull, or The Trial, Petrolio is diffuse, elliptic, and above all fragmentary. There is no telling, moreover, to what extent this fragmentary quality was Pasolini’s stylistic intention or merely a symptom of the novel’s aborted composition (only one fourth of it was drafted). Not published until 1992, the Einaudi Italian edition attempted to reproduce what was left of this 521-page manuscript which was found in a folder on Pasolini’s desk when he was murdered in 1975. Goldstein’s translation duplicates the contents of that folder: Pasolini’s “Project Note”; an unsent letter to Alberto Moravia describing the novel’s stylistic rationale; an outline of what might be called the novel’s plot; and the manuscript itself, consisting of about two hundred fragmentary Notes, or Appunti. Since this English edition will most likely be of interest to either Pasolini enthusiasts or scholars interested in narrative form and composition, it is regrettable that it does not also include a more extensive editorial apparatus. But for any other readers with the patience to endure its challenges to novelistic assumptions and formal polish, Petrolio offers a wealth of penetrating sociological, political, mythological, literary, and psychological reflections. [Thomas Hove]