It begins as a guided tour of hell. Tommaso, the protagonist of A Violent Life, grows up in a stinking shantytown on the outskirts of Rome shortly after World War II. Half-starved children play in sand littered with human excrement beside a river foully polluted, their everyday speech a litany of curses, taunts and threats. As a young man Tommaso becomes a thief, a bully and a sometime hustler, a homosexual prostitute. He and his vicious companions rob at random, sometimes beating their victims, their goal being to get no more than a few thousand lire with which to buy food, drink or the company of a woman. They are without talent, ambition or hope.

Even when Tommaso courts a respectable young woman, he seethes with resentment and hatred as he makes his crude advances in the darkness of a cheap movie house—the same hatred he feels for the "queens" or "faggots" he tries to hustle, or for his companions who remain unimpressed with him no matter what he does. He is in fact a pathetically ordinary young man who elicits little or no interest from anyone save his mother and his lackluster girlfriend, and the indifference he endures is emphasized by the author almost as much as the hunger and poverty he suffers all of his life.

But halfway through this gritty, dark and absorbing narrative, Tommaso is changed by unexpected good fortune. After serving time in prison for murder, he returns home to find his family living not in a stinking hovel but in a Government-financed house. A new optimism is born in him, a new tolerance for respectability; he gets a job and contemplates marriage to his girlfriend.

Then a strike in the Government hospital to which he is confined for treatment of tuberculosis brings him in contact with political activists. He is forced into displaying courage and then praised for it; it is perhaps the first real recognition he has ever known. And courage will later lead him to genuine altruism and his eventual death at the novel's end.

The political overtones are blatant. One doesn't have to know that Pier Paolo Pasolini, who was as celebrated during his lifetime for his politics as for his films, fiction and poetry, was a Marxist to see the statement being made here. Tommaso is not unredeemable. What he might have become, if he had been given half a chance, will never be known.

But this novel is a great deal more than the sum of its political ideas. It is not devitalized by or dependent on Marxist philosophy. Tommaso's story has its own profound and cumulative power; his world boils with life created by Pasolini's relentless use of dialogue and vivid detail.

Nothing is asserted that is not proven. You see and hear these people as they drink, quarrel and make love. And in the novel's larger moments—the brutal police raids on the shantytown and the Government hospital—his attention to detail invariably enlivens the grand scheme.

One doesn't come to like Tommaso. But a finer, more interesting feeling is evoked. When he faces his last moments with the same toughness that he has displayed all along, there is more than a touch of tragedy. It very nearly takes the breath away.

The novel raises two questions, however. The first has to do with the inevitable problems met in translations. The narrative, echoing the voice of its characters, is sprinkled with phrases like "good as gold" and "on the ball" and "it was no joke." And I can not help but wonder, are these English clichés really the equivalent of the original Italian? Or has freshness been sacrificed for words an English or American reader will more easily understand? Whatever the case, these tired expressions do not detract much from the impact of the book.

My second question has more to do with the artistic validity of the book. A Violent Life is about illiterate and inarticulate people and it purports to show them as they see themselves. Does it represent an informed and truly realistic insight into the nature of these people? Or is it a grossly exaggerated view of their brutality created by one who was never a part of them, a view that might be as romantic in its excess as a cloying sentimental approach? On the basis of the text alone I would say the question is impossible to answer, at least for this American reader. The milieu is simply too foreign, the poverty too oppressive, the minds of the characters too different from our own. Yet the question is of enormous importance, surely, even if all political considerations are put aside.

What can be said with certainty is that the novel not only works as a novel, it overwhelms. In fact, I found the effect of A Violent Life so strong that I have little desire to be reserved with my praise. Not since Hubert Selby's Last Exit to Brooklyn have I read a work so muscular and sublimely ugly, one that elicited so much revulsion and compassion at the same time. The endless violence of its petty characters transcends time and place and becomes a symphony of human struggle similar in impact to Martin Scorsese's masterly film, Raging Bull.

It probably should be mentioned here that Pasolini was murdered in 1975 at the age of 53 by a young man who some say was much like the young men described in this book.