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Author of one of the notable books of this 2024 literary season, Hotel Romaa story about the writer Cesare Pavese (1908-1950), it was with a book on another great Italian figure, Pier Paolo Pasolini (1922-1975), that Pierre Adrian made his literary debut in 2015. De Pasolini (1922-1975), we first remember the death as horrible as it was mysterious, never really elucidated. Did Giuseppe Pelosi, seventeen years old at the time, one of those little hits that the artist liked to tout, kill him? Some spoke more of the Mafia, the far right or the state apparatus. It is in Ostia, on the scene of the crime, that the The Pasolini slopes by Pierre Adrian. So what is this young Frenchman born in 1991 doing there? “ Why am I, so far from him, a 23-year-old Parisian student, still looking for him, where he is no longer? It is not a simple fascination for a man who has been pushed around all his life, a poet whose books aroused a painful emotion in me. There is something else. Perhaps an appetite for life, tortured by a malaise that Pasolini portrays wonderfully. There are also these visionary interventions, so right today they are, on the society he saw metamorphose. I have a naive taste for martyrs and diehards. In Pasolini, I saw a writer delivered to his torments and his detractors. A man constantly tempted by purity and sin. I recognized myself in many of his poetic appeals. They look like mystical impulses. I discovered a way that cries out to God and against him », he writes.
Pierre Adrian © F. Mantovani / Gallimard
An approach which has the merit of going beyond the reductive clichés painting this protean artist (filmmaker, novelist, poet, essayist, playwright), as a homosexual, a Marxist, a slayer of the Church, of the bourgeoisie, of power, of all powers. Pasolini was all that, but not only that. Because this “ men of paradoxes », according to the expression of Pierre Adrian, also denounced the lures of a sexuality supposedly liberated and yet the founder of new norms: “ the sexual freedom of the majority is in reality a convention, an obligation, a social duty, a social anxiety “. Behind the ideology of “unhindered enjoyment” displaying its tolerance, Pasolini discerned “ fierce and essentially repressive traits: because his tolerance is false and, in reality, no man should ever have been as normal and conformist as the consumer; as for hedonism, it obviously hides a decision to preordain everything with a cruelty that History has never known. »
Closer to Pasolini
Marxist but deeply imbued with Christianity (its Gospel according to Saint Matthew is in fact, as Pierre Adrian writes, “ the most beautiful film ever made about Christ “), against abortion but for its ” careful and painful legalization »: Pasolini cultivated his singular freedom. He was indeed “ the very example of the man who only enters churches when they are empty » and he advocated “ not to fear the sacredness and feelings, of which the secularism of the consumer society has deprived men by transforming them into ugly and stupid automatons, worshipers of fetishes. »
And The Pasolini slopes explore « the disturbing news » of the artist’s work and life, the book also takes more treacherous paths, being as much a quest as a hidden confession. Pierre Adrian takes the reader to Friuli, to Bologna, to Rome. He resurrects the man who was passionate about football, meets those who were his friends or his family, Gramsci remembers. This ambitious text of “ touch Pasolini up close » succeeds superbly.
Christian Authier
-> A book for the weekend
The Pasolini slopes • editions of Ecuador
