SOURCE: "Double Trouble," in The Los Angeles Times Book Review, March 23, 1997, p. 9.

In the following review, Armstrong calls Pasolini's Petrolio "maddeningly incoherent and self-contradictory."

Pier Paolo Pasolini was murdered in 1975 by a 17-year-old male hooker. This book—written between 1972 and 1974—was not published in Italy until 1992. Had the author lived longer than his 53 years, Petrolio would never have been published anywhere. It is the first draft of a book that, as Pasolini said in a letter to his pal, the widely read novelist Alberto Moravia, he hoped would eventually be issued in only a limited edition. This sprawling draft of what might have developed into a novel culls "documentation" from the overheated Italian press relating to the nefarious doings of Italy's political bosses, the Christian Democrats and the fascists in particular. The dark nature of the material also raised questions concerning his death.

Pasolini's killer did not convince...