Il carnefice

by Dario Bellezza, Pier Paolo Pasolini (Contributor)

"Ho scritto quests libro nel 1972 per soldi (e per amore). Avevo bisogno di un contratto, di uno stipendio; e Livio Garzanti, a cui il libro piacque, mi venne incontro.
In sei mesi finii Il carnefice, forse il mio libro più intenso, più tragico, più «vero». Non ricordo quel tempo, ne Ia società letteraria deIl'epoca; Pasolini scrisse un articolo dove mi consigliava di continuare sulla strada intrapresa, mi invitava a scrivere un seguito, un Mantiale del vizio.
Cosa che sto facendo solo ora, incapace di pensare che abbia potuto scrivere, un tempo, Il carnefice, cosi assoluto, cosi erotico.
Non esiste più, oggi, un erotismo del genere. Siamo nei lager: i diversi sono stati uccisi, Ia Peste del duemila ha fatto il resto. La maledizione doveva arrivare su questo mondo, su Sodoma." (Dario Bellezza)

Con uno scritto di Pier Paolo Pasolini

Genres: Fiction

138 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1973

About the author

Dario Bellezza was promoted by Pier Paolo Pasolini, who said, after the publication of his first book of poetry Invettive e licenze (1971), that Bellezza was «the best poet of the new generation». The previous year he released the novel l'Innocenza (1970) with a foreword by Alberto Moravia, a dark and tormented story with autobiographical elements. Also the following novels Lettere da Sodoma (1972) and Il carnefice (1973), are based on Bellezza's life.
His poetry contains autobiographical elements, as his homosexuality (which he lived in a maudit way with male prostitutes and drug addicts), his main influences were the italian poet Sandro Penna, but also Jean Genet and the symbolist Arthur Rimbaud, whom Bellezza traslated in italian the entire poetical work.
He died poor and alone by AIDS complications in Rome in 1996.

Reviews

[Domenico Francesco · Rating 3 out of 5]

Terzo romanzo di Dario Bellezza. Anche qui vicende autobiografiche e fiction si mischiano in maniera inestricabile. Seppur le vicende siano strettamente autobiografiche e intrise di quotidianità - popolate da personaggi curiosi, probabilmente personaggi reali (anche illustri) celati dietro pseudonimi -la scrittura ricercata e curata, qui più che altrove, ne valorizza ancora di più la dimensione narrativa. Come sempre, il sesso è molto presente nei romanzi di Bellezza, soprattutto i primi, ma è una sessualità mai funzionale alla storia e allo stesso tempo inscindibile all'opera stessa, un sesso senza valenza erotica e mai presentato come un qualcosa di positivo o di degno di nota, ma sempre trattato con le connotazioni masochistiche tipiche dell'autore e un linguaggio letterario sublime, reminescente di Genet.
Consigliatissimo agli appassionati dell'autore.

[Kevan Houser · Rating 3 out of 5]

The style of this book (published in 1973) made it difficult to read, and by read I mean really understand. Unfortunately, I could find little information about it in either Italian or English (and it doesn't seem to have ever been translated into English, so perhaps that partially explains why this book seems to have remained under the radar of anglophone critics).

Sadly, I won't be able to add much clarity here.

The book is largely autobiographical (towards the end — in chapter 23 — we learn that he's 30) and is a sort of confessional ("questa mia confessione" p. 94) , a letter to Dies Irae whom I don't think we ever actually meet, but who looms over everything in the book.

I'm a bit confused, because about 90% of the time, the author uses feminine adjectives and verbal forms for Dies Irae, but about 10% he uses masculine ones. (Other characters similarly have occasional "sex changes" grammatically.) Perhaps because he's referring to homosexual characters, he sometimes refers to them in one way or another, much as is done in English at times.

Parts are a little bit stream-of-consciousness with events arranged topically rather than strictly chronologically, so I'm not sure if there's a story in the traditional sense to follow: here we have a body of related events that communicate feelings and emotions more than anything else.

It's a sad story. Depressing, really. The narrator is gay, he lives what seems a sad life, always verging on poverty because he doesn't really work, selling paintings instead (it's vaguely defined, but an intermittent and unstable occupation apparently) constantly hiring young male hustlers to do things such as urinate and defecate on him, and these boys/young men are often drug addicted, shooting up in his (the narrator's) squalid home. What's more, he frequently moves from one living situation to another because he's afraid two young men he's somehow offended are coming to kill him (or later, coming to castrate him). His main male love basically uses him to get money to buy drugs, and has another male lover. He thinks about getting old and dying. There seems to be no beauty in his life, no love, no real friendship, no sense of any accomplishment, no fun.

He has some female(?) friends (or are they older queens?). But the majority of his time and his thoughts seem to revolve around Dies Irae — about when she(?) lived with him and when she left, and his attempts to track her down, apologize, reestablish their friendship, etc. He addresses her(?) directly at several points in the book, as if the book is a long letter to her.

The story went around and around, seemingly retreading ground that had already been covered, without making much narrative progress. (Maybe a reflection of a real life that seemingly stagnated?)

I honestly don't know what to make of it all. The writing is often elegant and very stylized, yet fairly modest and direct at the same time. I feel like I didn't fully appreciate or understand what the writer was trying to communicate.

Impossible for me to give a fair rating. I honestly didn't care for the book, but I gave it three stars as an acknowledgment that I'm unqualified to give it a fair review.

(I have a nice hard-cover edition originally priced at 2,300 lire! — It was $7.95 at my local used bookstore.)