SOURCE: "Focused on the Body," in The New York Times Book Review, November 30, 1986, p. 12.

In the following review, Brunette lauds John Shepley's translation of Pasolini's Arabian Nights and Other Stories.

Pier Paolo Pasolini was much more than an avant-garde film director who enjoyed thumbing his nose at middle-class audiences. A theorist of culture and a poet both in standard Italian and in his native Friulian dialect, he was also a writer of powerful and disturbing fiction. His talents in this last field are brilliantly demonstrated in Arabian Nights. The language of these five stories, all published between 1950 and 1965, is lush and overripe, like the images of his films. Always focused on the body, these stories are nevertheless dense with thought. Even his intensely physical descriptions of characters are curiously abstract as well, as though they were being recorded by a camera, from the outside. Plot disappears and time...