The Silver Book
A Novel
-
- $18.99
Publisher Description
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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Laing, who's written nonfiction about the lives of artists and one previous novel, Crudo, fuses the two forms with a lush narrative of art and love in 1970s Italy. The story unfolds over the year leading up to poet and film director Pier Paolo Pasolini's murder in 1975, and its main character is Nicholas Wade, a young English artist who leaves London in September 1974 for Venice, fleeing unspecified trouble after a torrid affair with another man. Nicholas is sketching on the steps of San Vidal church when he meets costume designer and special effects artist Danilo Donati. Their one-night stand yields a yearlong apprenticeship for Nicholas, during which they work on two film productions, Federico Fellini's Casanova and Pier Paolo Pasolini's Salò. In the Rome studio and on location in the countryside, Donati teaches Nicholas how to make fake snow and excrement, and they fashion "sinister, peeling buildings" into sites of a Nazi massacre. Describing the often grotesque material, Danilo proclaims: "We're not perverts, we're labourers in the dream factory!" As the mystery of what happened in London finally comes to light, trouble comes for Pasolini as well. It's 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.
