Theorem is a late work, produced when Pasolini was reaching the height of his fame as a unique film-maker (Theorem is also the title of a film he made while writing this book). It’s an important book because in it Pasolini coherently demonstrates his anger, his understanding of the emptiness and spiritual corruption of consumer society, particularly the unjust Italian one in which ‘equality’ means no more than the right to consume. It’s also very interesting from a structural point of view; it’s not the film script presented as a book one might expect but rather a ‘modernist literary artefact’ that is neither novel nor essay. Maybe this is the future of the book as an art form.

‘She too loses herself down the silent street where the guest was lost; she too is swallowed up by that desolate and arrogant stage-set of houses of the rich for whom it is a duty to give no sign of life.

The set alone remains — the index of an unreality which, in concrete terms, takes the form of a district of the dead, whose stones, whose cement, whose trees are a spectacle, motionless under the sun, which by its presence causes pain and offence.’ p135