Pétrole

The story of the typescript of Petrole follows that of the author: in November 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini is beaten to death on a beach in Ostia. An unsolved criminal case. The typed text he had been working on for three years was found unfinished in his office. Pasolini had investigated at length the mysterious death of industrialist Enrico Mattei.
Published seventeen years after the author's death and reissued, in 2022, in a revised version whose additions have been integrated into the present translation, Petrole recounts the daily life of a man experiencing a split personality. Carlo, a Catholic from an upper-middle-class family and an oil industry executive, makes a pact with the devil. We follow his rise to power, and the links he creates with a corrupt society... His double, Carlo 2, explores a sexuality marked by domination: a metaphor for social and political alienation.
Exempt from any form of self-censorship, this "laboratory novel" is a whole experimental world. A mirror of its author's exceptional personality, it undertakes a profound reflection on the power of the novelistic form and a dialogue with the history of literature and anthropology, in a kind of modern Divine Comedy.