The Silver Book. A Novel (en Inglés) - Olivia Laing

Art, power, desire, and illusion collide in a hypnotic new novel from Olivia Laing, set in the months leading up to the murder of Pier Paolo Pasolini in 1975.

It is September 1974. Two men meet in Venice. One is a young English artist, in panicked flight from London. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the designer responsible for realizing the spectacular visions of Fellini and Pasolini. Donati is in Venice to produce sketches for Fellini’s Casanova. A young apprentice is just what he needs.

He sweeps Nicholas to Rome and introduces him to the looking-glass world of Cinecittà, the studio where Casanova’s Venice will be ingeniously assembled. In the spring, the lovers move together to the set of Salò, Pasolini’s horrifying fable of fascism.

But Nicholas has a secret, and in this world of constant illusion, his real nature passes unseen. Amid the rising tensions of Italy’s Years of Lead, he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he doesn’t intend.

Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book is at once a queer love story and a noirish thriller set in the dream factory of cinema. It is a fictional account of real things, and an investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power.

“You don’t need to know anything about Donati, Fellini or Pasolini—as I didn’t—to get the most out of The Silver Book . . . A work of such atmospheric beauty, with a serenity and rhythm to the prose.”
—John Self, The Irish Times

“Sublime . . . [A] visceral portrait of Italian renegade filmmaking . . . Laing’s prose is taut and clear-eyed, even at its most sensational . . . This unsentimental style brings the 1970s Italian cinema scene to vivid life, making the work of Pasolini and Fellini feel fresh, daring and urgent.”
—Christopher Bollen, The New York Times

“[A] fever-dream of a novel . . . It’s a transportive, hot-blooded book, flooded by Roman light, sticky heat and scooter exhaust—and a potent tribute to the fierce, uncompromising vision of Pasolini, whose dark warnings have come home to roost 50 years later.”
—Hannah Lack, AnOther Magazine

“A fascinating guide to the illusions of the silver screen.”
—Michael Arditti, Financial Times

“Laing’s text conjures a tight, sensual world . . . [Laing has] a gift for capturing the subtle fluctuations of yearning and desire . . . Eerily timely.”
—Larissa Pham, Art in America

“In a series of swift-moving vignettes, Laing conjures Cinecittà’s tawdry make-believe which Fellini loved: empty lots, stray dogs, clown-like apparitions in coloured wigs . . . An absorbing amalgam of fact and fiction.”
—Ian Thomson, New Statesman

“[Olivia Laing’s] gripping novel is a love letter to cinema and also a thriller set among some of its most important and mysterious real-life characters.”
—Emily Burack and Adam Rathe, Town & Country

“Laing’s accomplished second novel, the slender The Silver Book, feels like a precision-controlled environment. In taut sentences, Laing evokes the sensuous eroticism and incipient danger of a 1970s Italian setting, moving towards a shattering conclusion . . . You do not need to be an expert on postwar Italian cinema or politics (or to know the true crime story unfolding here) to savour this novel. Laing describes the filming in dazzling clarity, 1970s Rome swaggers from the page.”
—Patricia Nicol, The Times

“Set during Italy’s tumultuous Years of Lead, [The Silver Book] couldn’t be timelier. And yet what Laing captures best is the texture of the times: the world changing at a fast pace and big scale while people are having sex and making things as if compulsively. Pleasure and peril here punctuate the everyday.”
—Emily Watlington, Art in America

“A technical tour de force . . . [Laing’s prose] pares down and transforms the messiness of the real into sentence after sentence of unforced lucidity.”
—Lucasta Miller, Times Literary Supplement

“Laing is a great interpreter of art as it relates to how we live today . . . Laing has done their
homework on this easily romanticized era, but more importantly, they understand the twinned
power and vulnerability of being age 22.”
—Greta Rainbow, Bustle

“An intriguing plot, but most notable is Laing’s lucid showcasing of the artists’ fervent yet tender collaborations, born of a shared ‘love of liberty’ and the ‘amusement rising’ in a lover’s
eyes. The author’s fans will adore this.”
—Publishers Weekly

“Rife with sensuality, illuminating archival details about the Italian film industry, and disquieting intimations about the growing social and political unrest that in only a few years would grow in terror and bloodshed . . . [The Silver Book is] mesmerizing, contemplative, and haunting.”
—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“This is a novel to fall in love with—at least I did—a canny hustler of a novel, brilliant, obsessive, hot, and yet it is also like the light on the water at night in Venice. This is the kind of novel you steal from your spouse or vice versa. And it is the work of an artist at the height of their powers—as if I could admire Laing more.”
—Alexander Chee, author of How to Write an Autobiographical Novel

“Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book is an enchanted tale of an accursed era. Young Nicholas’s coming of age and romantic adventures are set against the violent period in 1970s Italy known as the Years of Lead. In spare, subjective prose, with a deep appreciation of craft, material, texture, color, Laing brilliantly evokes Cinecittà when its creative masters were at their peak: Federico Fellini, Danilo Donati, Pier Paolo Pasolini. The book manages to be both wonderfully escapist and a timely warning.”
—Lucy Sante, author of I Heard Her Call My Name

“The Silver Book is an astounding work. It's difficult to believe this isn’t an eyewitness account: the characters appear to live and breathe in actual time and we experience with them all the erotic tensions, as well as the tragedies, involved in their defiant pursuit of beauty. The world of Fellini and Pasolini is uncannily resurrected in this visionary narrative.”
—Celia Paul, artist and author of Self-Portrait

“Like the script of an unwritten movie, voyeuristic, slick with 1970s decadence, glittering with shadows and unspoken sins, The Silver Book is lush, intense, wildly evocative; subtly freighted with emotional power and sensuality, it is simply [Laing’s] best book yet.”
—Philip Hoare, author of William Blake and The Sea Monsters of Love

“Such a haunting, sad, but creatively thrilling tale told with delicate economy.”
—Neil Tennant

“By taking us on set during the filming of two of the strangest movies ever made, Olivia Laing’s new novel makes us wonder all over again at how facts can be turned into fiction, then back once again into glittering and suggestive fact. A love story dedicated to cinema, to queerness, and to the alchemy of all good art.”
—Neil Bartlett, author of Address Book

“Transporting, heartbreaking, beautiful. I did not want this story to end.”
—Nigel Slater