A work in progress at the time of Pasolini's murder, Petrolio is made up of a series of notes - some extended and polished narrative passages, others cryptic messages from the author to himself that consist of no more than a few words. At the novel's center is Carlo, an oil executive who undergoes a profound personality split: Carlo 1 is a super-Machiavellian power monger; Carlo 2 lives only to satisfy his perverse and insatiable sexual desires.

Carlo also experiences a sexual metamorphosis in which he becomes, at will, female. The story of Carlo is interspersed with re-visions of myth - Oedipus, Medea, the Argonauts - and of Dante's hell. The teller of this story is also dual in nature. There is the author - the external shaper of the novel - who interrupts the text to comment on its mechanics and its meaning. And there is the narrator, whose cynical and seductive perspective comes from within Petrolio's fictional world.

Fragmentary, deliberately self-referential, meta-literary, schizoid, a devotional exploration of the male libido, an ode to the lust for power and the power of lust and, above all, a wrenching attempt to define the intellectual and his responsibilities, Petrolio is a postmodern masterpiece.