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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, Nicholas, is a young artist, plausible, English, desperate. The other is Danilo Donati, the magician of Italian cinema, the illusionist 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 brings Nicholas back 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 the Years of Lead, he acts as an accelerant, setting in motion a tragedy he didn't intend.
Olivia Laing's The Silver Book is at once a queer love story and a noir-ish 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.
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This information about The Silver Book was first featured
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Photo: Jonathan Ring
Olivia Laing is a widely acclaimed writer and critic. She's the author of seven books, including To the River (2011), The Trip to Echo Spring (2013), The Lonely City (2016) and Everybody (2021). She's a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and in 2018 was awarded the Windham-Campbell Prize for non-fiction. Her books have been translated into twenty-one languages.
Her first novel, Crudo, is a real-time account of the turbulent summer of 2017. It was a Sunday Times top ten bestseller and won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize.
Laing writes on art and culture for the Guardian, Financial Times and New York Times, among many other publications. She's written catalogue essays on a variety of contemporary artists, including Andy Warhol, Agnes Martin, Derek Jarman, Wolfgang Tillmans ...
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