Boys Alive
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
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 work of fiction and it remains his best known. Written in the aftermath of Pasolini's move from the provinces to Rome, the novel captures the. hunger and anger, waywardness and squalor of the big city. The life of the novel is the life of the city streets; from the streets, too, come its raw, mongrel, assaultive language. Here unblinkered realism and passionate lyricism meet in a vision of a vast urban inferno, blazing with darkness and light.
There is no one story to the book, only stories, splitting off, breaking away, going nowhere, flaming out, stories in which scenes of comic debacle, bitter conflict, wild joy, and crushing disappointment quickly follow. Pasolini's young characters have nothing to trade on except youth, and the struggle to live is unending. They loot, hustle, scavenge, steal. Somehow money will turn up; as soon as it does it will get spent. The main thing, in any case, is to have fun, and so the boys boast and vie, the desperate uncertainty of their days and nights offset by the fabulous inventiveness of their words. A warehouse heist, a night of gambling, the hunt for sex: The world of Boys Alive is a world in convulsion where at any instant disaster may strike.
Tim Parks' new translation of Pasolini's early masterpiece brings out the salt and brilliance of a still-scandalous work of art.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Pasolini's debut novel, first published in 1955 and given a new translation by Parks, foreshadows his focus as a filmmaker on restless and sometimes dangerous young men struggling to survive the mean streets of postwar Rome. As Parks reveals in his illuminating introduction, Pasolini "confessed" that the novel has no plot. The lack of forward motion mirrors the fortunes of these lost boys. Near the end of WWII, with the country occupied by the Germans, teens Riccetto and Marcello are antagonizing the neighborhood, committing robberies, and experimenting with sex. Pasolini harnesses a kinetic energy in the boys' encounters with others, such as when Riccetto comes across a "pretty" boy named Alduccio, with whom he exchanges colorful, double entendre–laced banter about how they might become gangsters or sex workers. There's also a playful and unsettling scene involving the boys attempting to breed a pair of mismatched dogs. Though some of the profanity feels pro forma to a contemporary reader, Parks ably captures the lyricism ("All the fine landscape... seemed to be made up of so many magnificent fragments immersed in a deep blue sky"). Pasolini's fans will find this eye-opening. Correction: An earlier version of this review mistakenly stated that the novel had not previously appeared in an English translation.
