At his death Pasolini left two unpublished novels among his papers, both of them dating from the late 1940s, when he lived in Friuli. Amado mio—scarcely more than a long novella—is the shorter and more polished of the two. Pasolini seems to have continued working on it after he moved to Rome in 1950, and to have contemplated publishing it in the early 1970s; the version edited in this volume by Concetta D'Angeli is the most recent of four successive drafts. Atti impuri, which is also published here for the first time, is considerably longer. It exists in only one manuscript, probably written before the move to Rome, and left in a far from finished state. It contains a number of inconsistencies and contradictions, some of which, notably the oscillation between first and third-person narrative, have been ironed out by the editor, while others have been allowed to stand.

The two texts are very close in style and subject-matter—Pasolini also left a common preface for them among his papers—and quite different from the author's later work. They are written in a conventional narrative form far removed from the dazzling, disruptive impasto of literary Italian and dialect or slang in the subsequent Roman novels; at this early stage Pasolini reserved dialect for his lyric poetry alone. They are both about homosexual love, more exactly a young man's love for adolescent boys. And they are both substantially autobiographical, indeed confessional—particularly Atti impuri, which in the manuscript was written mainly in the first person, is partially in diary form, incorporates large sections of Pasolini's own diaries and has a protagonist in almost every respect indistinguishable from Pasolini himself. In the later novels, in contrast, homosexuality is a very minor theme, and the tone is predominantly objective. Nowhere else, in fact, either in writing or on film, did the author expose his private inclinations and feelings as much as they are exposed in this book.

Nevertheless the book's interest is not purely documentary, nor indeed is it pornographic. Each novel centres on the seduction, after initial resistance, of a Friulan country boy, but scabrous though this subject may sound, the focus is definitely emotional rather than erotic. The protagonists' homosexual feelings are described with a relentless, compelling analytical thoroughness, a thoroughness that sometimes verges on irony, especially in Amado mio, where the narrative is in the third person, the pace is more rapid and the tone more cynical. They are obsessive, tortured feelings, though on account of their ferocity, not on account of a sense of guilt. They oscillate between violent extremes of vindictiveness and affection, and lead repeatedly to humiliation and despair, quite unlike the self-contained hedonism of Gide, whom Pasolini seems to have had particularly in mind as he wrote.

The novels are therefore far from being an apology for homosexual love, even though they contain no explicit criticism of it. Moreover while the potential sexual attractions of adolescent boys are expressed with considerable lyrical force, they appear to be such as to guarantee the frustration of the lover's desires. What excites Pasolini's protagonists is precisely what is lost through seduction: the boys' innocence and naturalness, and also their "mystery", as he calls it, their absorption in a closed adolescent world inaccessible to an older man, especially, perhaps, to an intellectual. One can understand easily enough why in each novel the object of desire seems always to elude the lover's grasp, condemning him to the constant, compulsive repetition of the same vain attempt at satisfaction.

The innocence, naturalness and "mystery" of adolescents is also a central theme of Pasolini's three later novels, Ragazzi di vita, Una vita violenta and Il sogno di una cosa. There, however, they are the subject of a more detached, much less egotistical kind of celebration, rather than the target of a character's desire; art seems to have been distanced from life, acquiring in the process a far more original and revelatory character. Interesting and powerful though the two early novels are, it is thus not hard to imagine why Pasolini never published them.