Copyright The Boston Globe
Moviemaking holds a storied place in Italy’s cultural life, an alluring combination that has played a supporting part in plenty of novels set in the Bel Paese, including William Styron’s “Set This House on Fire,” Gianfranco Calligarich’s “Last Summer in the City,” and Jess Walter’s “Beautiful Ruins.” But rarely have the personalities and particularities of the silver screen landed such a starring role as they do in Olivia Laing’s new novel, “The Silver Book.” At heart, this is the story of a torrid, 10-month romance between Oscar-winning Italian costumer designer Danilo Donati and (fictional) English art student Nicholas Wade, but the love affair often plays second fiddle to the novel’s detailed, behind-the-scenes accounts of two mid-1970’s films, Federico Fellini’s “Casanova” and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s “Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom.” Fellini helmed four of Italy’s record-setting 14 Oscar-winning international feature films, while Pasolini remains one of the more controversial directors of all time, thanks to both his outspoken politics and the graphic nature of his work, especially “Salò,” which was released in Italian theaters weeks after the filmmaker was brutally murdered on the outskirts of Rome. Laing ties the two men together via Donati, who works on both “Casanova” and “Salò” in the novel, which opens in September 1974 and concludes in November 1975, with Pasolini’s death. The 48-year-old Donati first spies 22-year-old Nicholas sketching on the steps of a Venetian cathedral. He’s smitten with the younger man’s “pale skin” and “flaming hair,” which give him the appearance of “a Renaissance angel,” and after sleeping with him that night, Dani hires Nico as his assistant. It’s a fortuitous turn of events for Nico, who fled London with nothing but a sketchbook in order to “remove himself from possible questions” after his previous lover died by suicide. That past haunts him at narratively convenient moments throughout the novel, but the mystery hinted at early on proves itself to be little more than a MacGuffin, a cinematic device used to move the plot along rather than unlock significant meaning. Advertisement After researching the Doge’s Palace, where Casanova was imprisoned, Dani whisks Nico south to the legendary environs of Cinecittà, basically the Roman equivalent of Hollywood’s Universal Studios Lot. Nico “has always navigated by chance,” and though he remains insecure with his relationship and apprenticeship throughout the novel, he consoles himself that even “if he doesn’t deserve it, at least he can be certain no one could want it more than him.” Once production delays hit Fellini’s film, Dani and Nico head to Northern Italy, where Pasolini is scouting sets and talent for “Salò,” and the couple continues to travel back and forth between the two locations for the rest of the novel. Dani and Nico’s relationship is messy, sexy, and melodramatic. The much older Dani alternately lusts after Nico, “he wants to take his prize home and play with him,” and fears him, “the boy is a burden, an undeniable weight in his days.” Early on they both openly have encounters with other men via cruising, but later they become possessive at different times, Dani when he realizes that Nico is interested in Pasolini and Nico when Dani invites a “street boy” to live with them. Eventually their abrupt mood changes start to feel more tied to plot necessities than anything that took place in their previous scene together, and I was often glad when Laing returned to the nitty-gritty of film production. Advertisement “The Silver Book” is clearly well-researched and replete with details about Fellini, Pasolini, Donati, and the making of these films. Fellini is such a control freak that he has his actors recite numbers or even a restaurant menu while he’s filming and then dubs in dialogue later, but he is especially abusive toward Donald Sutherland, who plays Casanova. Pasolini is portrayed as a remote man almost always thinking about or pursuing sex. He’s like “a lion tamer in a brown Missoni cardigan” while assessing dozens of village boys and girls who will be tortured, abused, and humiliated by the four libertines in “Salò,” which is based on the writings of the Marquis de Sade, though Pasolini’s treatment makes a pointed commentary on Mussolini’s Nazi-backed puppet government during the last months of the war. Things get a bit credulous, logistically and logically, when the historic theft of dozens of film reels gets shoehorned into the plot, but the novel’s biggest swing comes when its focus changes in the final act to a discussion of Italian politics and the specifics of Pasolini’s beliefs, expressed via an inflammatory op-ed and a revealing interview shortly before his murder. At the time, a teenaged sex worker confessed to the killing, but 30 years later he recanted his testimony and the case remains unsolved. Laing writes in a concluding author’s note that “Pasolini’s warnings about a system in which we are all enmeshed, and which has only grown more powerful in the past half-century” are arguably more important than the specifics of who was responsible for his death. It’s an understandable stance, but a topic that feels slightly at odds with the story that precedes it. Dani and Nico don’t need to have a happy ending, but I wished the camera hadn’t cut away so quickly from whatever it was they shared. Pasolini’s final weeks are fertile territory for fiction, but save it for the sequel. Advertisement Cory Oldweiler is a freelance writer. The Silver Book By Olivia Laing Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 256 pages, $27
