The Street Kids

The Street Kids [Ragazzi di vita] (Europa Editions, 2016)
by Pier Paolo Pasolini [translated from the Italian by Ann Goldstein]
Italy, 1955

I knew this was going to be a tough slog in a way when, near the end of the first chapter, Marcello gives Riccetto a hard time for rescuing a swallow that'd been drowning in the river during their swim: "'Why'd you save it,' Marcello said to him.  'It was fun to watch it die!'"  What I didn't know going in was how unpredictable and vital the young Pasolini's prose would turn out to be.  The faces of two older neighborhood boys, for example, are likened to "exhibits from a museum of criminals, preserved in oil" (39); a fat woman and her companion are described in terms of two different types of cooked fish--"her face like a boiled fish, and beside her an ugly little nobody, maybe her husband, with a face like a fried fish, poor devil, who was sobering up" (112); and elsewhere, this slice of life from the Via Taranto where "the fresh breeze, which would make a face go white and blue, like fennel, every so often shook the rows of sleepy, consumptive trees that, on either side of the street, rose with the façades toward the sky over San Giovanni" (141).  In short, I loved taking in all of Pasolini's painterly exuberance even if The Street Kids' Rome, or at least the poverty-ridden "apartment blocks, the evacuees' houses, or the skyscrapers" on the city's postwar periphery (182) = more the canvas for a crucifixion than such loving brushstrokes might lead you to believe.  An Old Master in the age of Italian neorealism!

Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975)