These are five stories, set in Rome and Paris, selected mainly from one of Pasolini’s richest books, the collection Ali dagli Occhi Azzurri published in 1965. One could say that here Pasolini was at his height as a prose writer, writing with a kind of merciless lucidity not equaled before or since. He manages in A Rustic Story for instance to write in a savagely ironic tone without ever seeming arrogant or uncaring about his protagonists. The book reveals a harsh and unsentimental canvas of rent boys, illegal immigrants and street children. This is a very different Pasolinian world to the —spiritual and philosophical preoccupations of his films such as The Gospel according to Saint Matthew and Theorem or the wry sensuality in Canterbury Tales or Decameron. The mystery is how did one artist achieve so much in the separate fields of poetry, prose and the cinema? The breadth of Pasolini’s work puts him in a very rare category of ‘cultural genius’ and this collection, originally published by the excellent American Marlboro Press and now also in Quartet, is a fitting tribute.

‘On winter evenings, when a vein of warmth spreads by flattening itself on surfaces that smell of washed and reheated rags, of old iron on which the sun, scrubbed by the wind, beats without warning — or else a mood flat as a metal pan reflects from a country sky threadlike laminae that attach themselves to serrated edges and to walls — orange-coloured fibres are lighted over the square cobblestones used to pave the streets...with a layer of hard dust, almost abstract, and discharging a filth by which feelings are more infected than bodies.’ p55 A Night On The Tram