Pasolini Requiem

Riveting and impassioned, Pasolini Requiem is the definitive biography of one of the greatest Renaissance men of the twentieth century. Pier Paolo Pasolini was a driven man: uncompromising, many-talented, homosexual, at once anti-Fascist and anti-Communist, anti-clerical and profoundly religious. He was - in one fervent lifetime - a poet and novelist (The Ragazzi, A Violent Life), cultural critic, political polemicist, and filmmaker (The Gospel According to Matthew. Theorem, Decameron, and his last, desperate legacy, Salo). Informed by research into the murder of the man and the making of his myth, Pasolini Requiem gives a powerful account of the life and art of its subject, a crucial figure immersed in every social and cultural conflict of his time. Witness and protagonist, Pasolini was born the year Mussolini came to power (1922) and died when the Italian Communist Party almost achieved it (1975). His crowded fifty-three years saw. Him repeatedly charged with obscenity and even "damaging the religion of the State." Always acquitted, he always scandalized. Barth David Schwartz charts Pasolini's career from his childhood, through his years at university and his arrival in Rome, where he flowered as an artist. Here, in the capital's pitiless periphery, he died in a setting observers called pasolinian, at the hands of one (or more) of the boys he had loved and finally came to hate.