{"product_id":"petrolio-pier-paolo-pasolini-9798896230304","title":"Petrolio","description":"\u003cb\u003eNotorious writer and filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini's final novel--visionary, phenomenally strange, and unfinished at the time of his brutal murder--tells a fragmentary and characteristically provocative story of an oil executive split between the desire to dominate and the desire to be dominated.\u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eSeventeen years after Pier Paolo Pasolini's brutal death, his sprawling, unfinished magnum opus was published in Italy. \u003ci\u003ePetrolio\u003c\/i\u003e is an extraordinary display of Pasolini's powers of language and invention. Long suppressed by Pasolini's family, it received the highest critical acclaim while causing public outrage and political scandal--proving the author's enduring power to provoke, astonish, and inspire awe. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eA work in progress at the time of Pasolini's murder, \u003ci\u003ePetrolio\u003c\/i\u003e is made up of a series of notes--some extended and polished narrative passages, others cryptic messages from the author to himself that consist of no more than a few words. At the novel's center is Carlo, an oil executive who undergoes a profound personality split: Carlo 1 is a super-Machiavellian power monger; Carlo 2 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 myth--Oedipus, Medea, the Argonauts--and of Dante's hell. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eThe teller of this story is also dual in nature. There is the author--the external shaper of the novel--who interrupts the text to comment on its mechanics and its meaning. And there is the narrator, whose cynical and seductive perspective comes from within \u003ci\u003ePetrolio\u003c\/i\u003e's fictional world. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eFragmentary, 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, \u003ci\u003ePetrolio\u003c\/i\u003e is a postmodern masterpiece.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAuthor:\u003c\/b\u003e Pier Paolo Pasolini\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eISBN-13:\u003c\/b\u003e 9798896230304\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublisher:\u003c\/b\u003e New York Review of Books\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eLanguage:\u003c\/b\u003e English\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePublished:\u003c\/b\u003e 04\/28\/2026\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003ePages:\u003c\/b\u003e 496\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eFormat:\u003c\/b\u003e Paperback\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eWeight:\u003c\/b\u003e 0.81lbs","brand":"Pier Paolo Pasolini","offers":[{"title":"Paperback","offer_id":47756860948735,"sku":"9798896230304","price":19.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0662\/2982\/9887\/files\/img_72eca34d-c311-4c8a-b28f-e5b6d97f7a2b.jpg?v=1765509680","url":"https:\/\/www.whiterainbookhouse.com\/products\/petrolio-pier-paolo-pasolini-9798896230304","provider":"WR Book House","version":"1.0","type":"link"}