A daring novel, once widely censored, about the scrappy, harrowing,
and inventive lives of Rome's unhoused youth by one of Italy's greatest
film directors.
Boys Alive, published in 1955, was Pier Paolo Pasolini's first novel
and remains his best-known work of fiction. He'd moved to Rome a few
years before, after finding himself embroiled in a provincial sex
scandal, and the impact of the city on Pasolini--its lively, aggressive
dialect, its postwar squalor and violence--was accompanied by a new
awareness that for him respectability was no longer an option: "Like it
or not, I was tarred with the brush of Rimbaud . . . or even Oscar
Wilde." Urgently looking for teaching work, walk-on parts in films,
literary journalism, anything to achieve independence and security, he
was drawn to other outcasts who cared nothing for bourgeois values, who
lived intensely, carelessly, refusing to be hampered by scruple and
convention.
This was the context in which he began to work on a novel, and though
socialism was the intellectual and artistic fashion of the day and
Pasolini was a socialist, his book was completely free of any
sentimental or patronizing concern for the plight of the
underprivileged. Pasolini revels in the vitality of the squalor he so
lavishly and energetically evokes. In Boys Alive, he devotes his
native lyricism and vast literary resources to conjuring up an urban
inferno as vast and hideous as it is colorful and dynamic.
There is no grand plot, but Pasolini's narrative voice moves like a
heat-seeking missile, infallibly locking onto situations of great
intensity, conflict and comedy. Possessing nothing, his young characters
fight to survive and to live. At all costs they must have fun; boredom
is death. And if food and fun must be paid for, then money will be
found: looting, hustling, scavenging, stealing. Once found it is
immediately squandered on sharp clothes and shoes, drunk away, gambled
away, or simply lost. Boasting and exhibitionism are the norm, and every
boy aspires to be the toughest, the shrewdest, the most unscrupulous
punk on the block. As each new episode begins--a warehouse heist, an
evening's gambling, a search for sex--the reader can only tremble,
waiting for disaster to strike. Everything is up in the air. Nothing is
predictable.
Tim Parks' new translation of Pasolini's early masterpiece brings out
the salt and intelligence of this vital and never less than scandalous
work of art.
