[In the following review, Brunette lauds John Shepley's translation of Pasolini's Arabian Nights and Other Stories.]

Pier Paolo Pasolini was much more than an avant-garde film director who enjoyed thumbing his nose at middle-class audiences. A theorist of culture and a poet both in standard Italian and in his native Friulian dialect, he was also a writer of powerful and disturbing fiction. His talents in this last field are brilliantly demonstrated in Arabian Nights. The language of these five stories, all published between 1950 and 1965, is lush and overripe, like the images of his films. Always focused on the body, these stories are nevertheless dense with thought. Even his intensely physical descriptions of characters are curiously abstract as well, as though they were being recorded by a camera, from the outside. Plot disappears and time is shuffled like a deck of cards, made spatial and affective. Precisely evoked emotion and sensation organize these tales more than chronology or narrative thrust.

Several of the stories are so strong, so raw in their homoeroticism, that one is dumbfounded to discover that the earliest was written more than 35 years ago. Pasolini's characteristic style is a kind of supercharged realism. In some stories it becomes surrealistic; in others the realism is so stylized that every detail of the terrain seems, as in a Dürer engraving, filled with meaning beyond its brute existence. His principal subject is the articulation of a landscape, usually a Roman slum, and though his humans sometimes seem accidental features, his vision is always a moral one.

At times Pasolini is the ironic, detached observer as in "Studies on the Life of Testaccio," a superb sketch of a working-class gang in a Roman suburb, filled with psychological insight into the calculating cruelty that motivates the warped lives of the gang members. At other times he inserts himself as the "author" in search of sexual fulfillment; here his restless prose seems almost mad with desire, paralleling Pasolini's own relentless sexuality and the charged aimlessness of the young boys he describes. The final story, "Rital and Raton," shows the author overtly rejecting both the demands of a shocked bourgeoisie and those of the moralistic Communist Party to which he belonged—to the party's great embarrassment—for many years. Suggesting an early Jean-Luc Godard film in prose, the story is a montage of fact, fiction, quotes from Roland Barthes, political polemic, an appearance by Mr. Godard himself and autobiographical rumination. It constitutes a powerful meditation on language, marginality, racism, and sex, and their interrelationships. Though written more than 20 years ago, it is a nearly paradigmatic postmodern text.

John Shepley's translation of these stories is a triumph. Rendered into a dense, visceral English, it is startlingly true to the lushness of the Italian original.