Boys Alive
SynopsisPlot
Boys Alive, published in 1955, was Pier Paolo Pasolini's first work of fiction and it remains his best known. Written in the aftermath of Pasolini's move from the provinces to Rome, the novel captures the. hunger and anger, waywardness and squalor of the big city. The life of the novel is the life of the city streets; from the streets, too, come its raw, mongrel, assaultive language. Here unblinkered realism and passionate lyricism meet in a vision of a vast urban inferno, blazing with darkness and light.
Story
About this book
Boys Alive, originally published in Italian as Ragazzi di vita in 1955, was Pier Paolo Pasolini's first novel. It follows groups of young people living on the margins of Rome, scraping by through petty schemes, odd jobs, and improvisation in the borgate, the poor outer neighborhoods that expanded rapidly after the Second World War. Pasolini had moved to Rome from the rural northeast of Italy a few years earlier, and the city he encountered supplied both the setting and the language of the book. Much of the dialogue draws on Roman street slang, giving the prose a rough, local texture unusual in Italian literary fiction of that period.
The novel attracted immediate controversy. Italian authorities pursued an obscenity case against it, and it was censored in several countries. The charge centered on its frank depiction of poverty, petty crime, and the daily reality of young people surviving without stable housing or family support. Pasolini, who later became widely known as a filmmaker, treated these lives with close, unsparing observation rather than sentimentality. The book remains his most recognized work of prose fiction, and this English-language edition carries the title Boys Alive.
