A Violent Life

Manchester: Carcanet, 1985; (1959). Paperback Reprint of the first English language Edition. Octavo in red wraps illus in b&w; white spine; 320 p. Minor spotting and wear to extrermities; else overall near fine thus. A crisp copy. Paperback. ISBN: 0856355917

Uncommon thus. First published in Pasolini's native Italain by Garzanti in 1959, Una vita violenta was Pasolini's second novel of Rome's sub-proletariat. It followed Ragazzi di vita (1955) and was written just before he turned to filmmaking. The novel follows Tommaso Puzzilli, whose family was bombed out during the war and now lives in a hut in "Little Shanghai," a shantytown on the city's edge. Tommaso drifts through petty theft, drinking, and the street-level neo-Fascism of the Movimento Sociale Italiano (Italian Social Movement). A knife fight sends him to prison. He courts Irene, takes a job, and is struck down with tuberculosis. In the hospital he sympathizes with a strike by patients and staff, and he moves toward the Communist commitment that makes the book an ironic Bildungsroman. The novel ends with a flood in the slums. Pasolini wrote much of the dialogue in Roman street dialect, which made translation notoriously difficult. William Weaver's rendering into idiomatic English was published by Jonathan Cape in London in early 1968, after negotiations that had begun years earlier, with a Pantheon edition in New York the same year. It won Weaver the 1969 John Florio Prize for the best translation from Italian. Reviewers at the time compared its voice to Hubert Selby Jr.'s Last Exit to Brooklyn. Carcanet reissued the translation in Manchester in 1985. Pasolini, Pier Paolo 1922-1975