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The Street Kids Paperback – August 30, 2016

by Pier Paolo Pasolini (Author), Ann Goldstein (Translator)

4.2 45 ratings

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The “provocative” novel about hard-living teenagers in poverty-stricken postwar Rome, by the renowned Italian filmmaker (The New York Times).

Set during the post–World War II years in the Rome of the borgate―outlying neighborhoods beset by poverty and deprivation―The Street Kids tells the story of a group of adolescents belonging to the urban underclass. Living hand-to-mouth, Riccetto and his friends eke out an existence doing odd jobs, committing petty crimes, and prostituting themselves. Rooted in the neorealist movement of the 1950s, The Street Kids is a tender, heart-rending tribute to an entire social class in danger of being forgotten.
Heavily censored and criticized, lambasted by much of the general public upon its publication, The Street Kids nevertheless had a force and vitality that eventually led to its being considered a masterpiece. This new translation comes from Ann Goldstein, the acclaimed translator of Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels.

Editorial Reviews

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Praise for Pier Paolo Pasolini

"[Pasolini was a] brilliant intellectual, a director, and a homosexual, whose political vision-based on a singular entwinement of Eros, Catholocism, and Marxism-foresaw Italian history after his death, and the burgeoning of global consumerism."
—Ed Vulliamy, The Guardian

"Pasolini is Italy's most important twentieth century poet."
—Alberto Moravia, author of The Conformist and Roman Tales

"Pasolini was an artist and thinker who tried not to resolve his contradictions but rather to fully embody them."
—Dennis Lim, The New York Times

“Pasolini does in prose what Giuseppe Gioachino Belli had done in poetry a century before, namely voice society’s dregs in their own distinctive idiom.”
—TLS

"Pasolini was always searching, completely open to different ways of looking at things."
—Jytte Jensen, curator of the Pasolini retrospective at the Museum of Modern Art, New York

About the Author

Pier Paolo Pasolini was born in 1922. He was an Italian film director, poet, writer, and intellectual. Throughout his life he exhibited extraordinary cultural versatility and became a highly controversial figure in the process. While his work remains controversial, since his death in 1975, Pasolini has come to be seen as a visionary thinker and a major figure in italian literature and art. American literary critic Harold Bloom considered Pasolini to be a major 20th-century poet and included his works in his collection of the Western Canon.

Ann Goldstein is an editor at The New Yorker. Her translations for Europa Editions include novels by Amara Lakhous, Alessandro Piperno, and Elena Ferrante's bestselling My Brilliant Friend. She lives in New York.

Product details

Publisher ‏ : ‎ Europa Editions (August 30, 2016)
Language ‏ : ‎ English
Paperback ‏ : ‎ 240 pages
ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1609453085
ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1609453084
Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.4 ounces
Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.4 x 0.7 x 8.3 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #939,438 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #2,159 in Political Fiction (Books)
- #8,687 in Coming of Age Fiction (Books)
- #42,233 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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4.2 45 ratings

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rosaria piomelli

Pier Paolo Pasolini- his commentary on roman kids

Reviewed in the United States on July 28, 2017

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This book is well written. Pasolini describes his people and places in the most intimate details so that we are able to view the film that he would make with our mind's eye participation.
The places are hard and the kids proved, but having lived there for many years, I can attest to the reality of his representations.
His work, so personal and profound continues to demonstrate how difficult it is to accept his early death by an assassin not yet identified.

3 people found this helpful

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J.K.

Pasolini was a genius. His imagination, creativity, ...

Reviewed in the United States on January 16, 2017

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Pasolini was a genius. His imagination, creativity, critical spirit with sharp mind, sensitivity and knowledge made everything he made a masterpiece.

2 people found this helpful

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WillDecker

The Boys Pasolini Loved

Reviewed in the United States on October 31, 2016

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These are the boys Pier Paolo Passolini loved. He described them spot on.

One person found this helpful

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Deranieri

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on January 8, 2018

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Very enjoyable book.

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Ronnie Tyler

Well this was pretty bleak.

Reviewed in the United States on August 1, 2020

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Really more of a string of connected vignettes than a novel, I was numb and bored by page 50. Again and again the poverty, the hopelessness and downright cruel meanness of the characters lives was like being beaten with a filthy pipe. Strangely, the descriptions could be by turns beautiful and touching, but the repetition was too much. This book just didn’t click with me.

2 people found this helpful

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Amazon Customer

Five Stars

Reviewed in the United States on February 12, 2017

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love it !

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Al

What a great book. Pasolini describes street kids in post world war two rome with precision and compassion.

Reviewed in Canada on August 30, 2020

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He brings his characters to life so we care about them, without condoning g their criminal lifestyle and activities. Pasolini's description of the underside of rome after world war two is vivid and enlightening. His book makes me want to read his poetry.

Philip Herring

Pagan sensuality

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 9, 2018

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In Pasolini's first novel (1955) Il Riccetto is the central character linking eight independent 'chapters'. He opens the book as a wilful boy anxious to escape from his communion and closes it as a hardened young man walking away from a tragedy on the river - having done time in prison in between. He and his companions exist in the impoverished outskirts (Le Borgate) of Rome among shacks and hovels, collapsing buildings and abandoned half-finished constructions. Whole families of the evicted or homeless live in a single room or divide up a landing. The young toughs get by selling scrap, picking over tips, pinching from markets, bag-snatching and mugging. They circulate aimlessly through back-streets alleys, parks and along river banks, city walls and beaches - sensing the sexual undercurrents, occasionally visiting prostitutes or selling themselves, their innocence quickly corrupted. And irrupting through this diurnal grind a mother crushed by rubble, a wife beaten, a criminal shot, a runaway drowned, a parent knifed, a weakling bullied and a boy with T.B. spits up his lungs.....Declared obscene at the time, Pasolini's description of this underclass in post-war Rome is vividly truthful, in the rich vein of verismo and neorealism. Despising the middle classes, Pasolini identified strongly with the proletariat, partly because he too was marginalised (by his aestheticism and his inclinations). His characters speak in vibrant Roman dialect (a continuation of his boyhood interest in Friulian), the 'foreign' language of the segregated. He preferred this to Italian proper, the language of literature, power and authority. Essentially a poet, there are many evocative descriptions of Rome's streets, banks, parks, gardens and architecture in the moonlight or under a beating sun.....As for Il Riccetto, almost our last glimpse of him is frolicking mid-stream amidst industrial flotsam then , standing naked, Pan-like, in undergrowth watching a girl cleaning the factory windows - embodying all that pagan sensuality issuing from the borgate. If you wish to read this book in Italian have a fat dictionary to hand; even then many of Pasolini's words are not in it - yet you will still be hugely rewarded. You can find these scenes and sensations of Rome again, distilled and compressed in his poetry.

One person found this helpful