Love Goes On. A Novel with Pasolini

Fifty years ago, Pier Paolo Pasolini was brutally murdered in Ostia, Rome. The crime was never solved, and there was more speculation about his death than about the incomparable films, books, plays, drawings, pamphlets and prophecies he left behind. For Albert Ostermaier, however, since he himself began writing poetry, Pasolini and his work have stood out like a fixed star above everything else. With his Novel with Pasolini, he now pays a passionate tribute to him by drawing on Pasolini's invocation of poetry, the 112 sonnets he left behind, cries for help from someone abandoned by his ‘life partner’ Ninetto Davoli. Like Pasolini, Ostermaier transcends boundaries – for both of them, everything private is political and everything political is private.

In his empathetic appropriation of Pasolini's sonnets and in the wake of his mysterious murder, Albert Ostermaier pulls out all the linguistic stops and, in a relentless autobiographical self-exploration, learns something about himself that he would never have learned without Pasolini: love goes on.

"He’s the forsaken. He’s been forsaken by love, by his sweet reason, a sour shadow now, shading his eyesight. The field of view of the camera between his fingers is fake. The camera, his eye. He shoots one image after another. He wraps up the shadows. And buried among those shadows is a laugh. Each word cries out: Come back, come back to me. I was with you, I was never yours. Come back."