This article challenges the established reading of Atti impuri and Amado mio, Pasolini’s early unfinished novels about young homosexual love, as diaristic. Previous accounts of the Friulan novels have largely ignored the fact that their final redactions were drawn up in Rome, where the author had fled from Friuli in January 1950 in the wake of a sexually tinged scandal. The present analysis suggests that the novels’ relationship to their setting should be read as nostalgic, and compares them to the poetic works on Friuli that Pasolini wrote in Rome in the early 1950s. This poetics of absence provides the backdrop for a reflection on the practice of realist authorship that engages with contemporary neorealist narrative from a position of paradoxical outsiderhood
