SOURCE: "Boys in Their Mystery," in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4162, January 7, 1983, p. 23.

In the following review, Robey discusses two of Pasolini's novels, Amado mio and Atti impuri, that were published posthumously and asserts that "The two texts are very close in style and subject-matter … and quite different from the author's later work."

At his death Pasolini left two unpublished novels among his papers, both of them dating from the late 1940s, when he lived in Friuli. Amado mio—scarcely more than a long novella—is the shorter and more polished of the two. Pasolini seems to have continued working on it after he moved to Rome in 1950, and to have contemplated publishing it in the early 1970s; the version edited in this volume by Concetta D'Angeli is the most recent of four successive drafts. Atti impuri, which is also published here for the first time, is considerably longer...