Pasolini, Fellini, and The Silver Book

The spark between the two men is immediate. Nicholas is running away from something, and interviewing Laing for AnOther Magazine, Hannah Lack says that she imagines him as a character straight out of Donald Cammell and Nicolas Roeg’s Performance (1970). “That’s exactly right,” says Laing. “I really had Performance in my mind, because it felt like that moment in London where things are getting a bit dark and you’ve got to get out.”

Donati is working on two productions at once, Fellini’s Casanova (1976) and Pier Paolo Pasolini’s Salò, or The 120 Days of Sodom (1975), and he brings Nicholas back with him to Rome. For Lack, The Silver Book is “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 fifty years later.”

“Laing’s portrait of the austere, soft-spoken Pasolini is the antithesis of the extravagant, exuberant Fellini, in person, politics, and cinematic vision,” writes Michael Arditti in the Financial Times. “Yet Danilo is equally devoted to both.”

“Laing’s prose is taut and clear-eyed, even at its most sensational,” writes Christopher Bollen in his review of this “sublime new novel” for the New York Times. “Fellini wants to ‘stick the audience’s head in a jeweled bucket of regurgitated wine’; Pasolini conjures an ‘orgy of terror’; Donati is ‘making clothes for rapists who will never be indicted, clothes for murderers who will reappear in the next government.’ This unsentimental style brings the 1970s Italian cinema scene to vivid life, making the work of Pasolini and Fellini feel fresh, daring, and urgent.”

Writing for the Observer, Olivia Ovenden notes that “one memorable description of the preparation behind a six-course New Year’s Eve meal thrown in honor of Pasolini features a skinned hare, pork mince stuffed into trotters with a ‘fat silver needle,’ and a Caravaggio-inspired table of red candles and dried fruit: a ‘red cave of friendship, candlelit, liquid at the edges.’ Laing has such a gift for capturing these kinds of shimmering details that at times it is hard not to feel—like Nicholas, newly arrived in ‘a world so saturated with decoration’—overwhelmed as reels of images flicker past without time for them to soak in.”

The Silver Book, “an absorbing amalgam of fact and fiction, exalts Salò as an admonitory horror masterwork for our times,” writes Ian Thompson in the New Statesman. Recasting the Marquis de Sade’s unfinished eighteenth-century novel in the last outpost of Fascist Italy in 1944, Salò was released three weeks after Pasolini was brutally murdered on November 2, 1975.

Marking the cruel fiftieth anniversary in the Guardian, Laing sends readers to “What is this coup d’état? I know,” an essay Pasolini had written one year before. “What Pasolini knew,” writes Laing, “and what he refused to remain silent about, was the nature of power and corruption during Italy’s brutal 1970s; the so-called ‘Years of Lead,’ named for an epidemic of assassinations and terrorist attacks by both the extreme left and right. What he knew, in short, was that fascism was not over, and that the right would metastasize, returning in a new form to claim power over a populace stupefied by the tawdry blandishments of capitalism. Was Pasolini wrong in his predictions? I think we all know the answer to that.”

Laing will be discussing The Silver Book in London on Wednesday, in Milan on Sunday, in Venice on November 18, and in Rome on November 20.