SOURCE: A review of A Violent Life, in The New York Times Books Review, November 3, 1985, p. 38.

In the following review, Rice states that Pasolini's Marxism is evident in his novel A Violent Life, but asserts that in addition to the political overtones, "Tommaso's story has its own profound and cumulative power; his world boils with life created by Pasolini's relentless use of dialogue and vivid detail."

It begins as a guided tour of hell. Tommaso, the protagonist of A Violent Life, grows up in a stinking shantytown on the outskirts of Rome shortly after World War II. Half-starved children play in sand littered with human excrement beside a river foully polluted, their everyday speech a litany of curses, taunts and threats. As a young man Tommaso becomes a thief, a bully and a sometime hustler, a homosexual prostitute. He and his vicious companions rob at random, sometimes beating...