The Silver Book

(by Olivia Laing)

At the start of this novel we meet Nicholas, a 22-year-old art-school grad who is leaving London in a hurry for reasons that become clear only later. He goes to Venice thinking of beauty and anonymity: “He can look at churches and paintings, dip himself into the blue and gold waters of the Quattrocento. Everyone knows Venice is the place to dissolve completely, to emerge changed, or to not emerge at all.” Shortly after his arrival in Venice he meets Danilo Donati, who’s working on set designs for Fellini’s Casanova: one thing leads to another and Nicholas finds himself in Rome, living with Dani, working at Cinecittà. But Fellini’s film runs into financing difficulties, so Dani shifts to working with Pasolini on Salò instead, and Nicholas comes along for the ride on that one too. The book opens in September 1974 and if you know anything about Pasolini’s life you probably can figure out where the story is going, which adds some dread to the reading experience—and I think that undertone of dread works well with various elements of the story, from the subject matter of Salò (“The film is an autobiography of loss; the film is a history of now,” Dani thinks, as he works on costumes for it) to the way Dani finds himself thinking about his feelings for Nicholas (“he is in danger, he has gambled more than he can afford”).

I like Laing’s writing a whole lot and found this book’s prose satisfyingly atmospheric: I like the specificity of color and texture, whether Laing is writing about the chill in the air in the countryside by Lake Garda in winter or pastries in Rome; I like the evocation of various elements of the sets and costumes of Casanova and Salò. I like how taking a tram at night is described as “travelling in a moving lightbox through the outer suburbs of Rome, a voyeur’s paradise”; I like how Laing evokes the “watertight world”/”universe of two” of Dani and Nicholas’s relationship with sentences like this: “There’s frost on the windowpanes. They burrow in their scarlet cave, the same colour as the inside of an eyelid.”