SOURCE: "Courting Contradiction," in The New York Times Book Review, March 23, 1997.

In the following review of Petrolio, Eberstadt asserts that "all of Pasolini's most passionate opinions—from the sanctity of poverty to the vileness of heterosexual couples—have been folded together in this messy, harsh austerely intelligent phantasmagoria-cum-political treatise [Petrolio."]

In 1975, Pier Paolo Pasolini—philologist, film maker, poet, novelist and political essayist—was murdered on a wintry beach near Rome by a teen-age hustler with unknown accomplices. Throughout his fervidly productive career, Pasolini had courted contradiction. He was an open homosexual who deplored sexual permissiveness, divorce and the legalization of abortion; a radical who despised the student protesters of 1968; a Marxist who elegized rural tradition and believed that "internationalism" equaled cultural genocide; a professed nonbeliever who—in films like Teorema and The Gospel According to St. Matthew—produced very powerful religious art. At the time of his still...