Olivia Laing’s The Silver Book Enters 1970s Italian Cinema

By Marcus Bennett

The Center for Fiction identifies Olivia Laing as the author of eight books. Its event description places their new novel, The Silver Book, in the world of 1970s Italian cinema, framing it through art, queer love and illusion.

The center calls The Silver Book historical fiction that blends truth with imagination, intimacy and spectacle. It presents the novel as both a love story and a meditation on the moral power of art. The stated subjects include the politics of beauty, the intimacy of art and the seduction of storytelling.

Art as material practice

In a conversation presented by The Center for Fiction, Laing joined Rachel Kushner, whom the center introduced as the author of The Flamethrowers and The Mars Room. Kushner called The Silver Book a homage to the magic of people making things. She said its uncommon achievement lies in rendering people doing and making.

Kushner linked passages in the novel to Maylis de Kerangal’s Painting Time. Her comparison centers on a woman entering the Beaux-Arts Academy in Brussels to paint trompe l’oeil. Kushner said it remained uncommon to read a novel that knows how to render people doing and making.

The discussion turns to Danilo’s elaborate New Year’s Eve meal. Kushner said the descriptions recalled MFK Fisher because of their attention to the deliberate ritual of preparation.

Laing said: “I wanted that to feel like time stops. It's the fulcrum of the novel and everything slows right down.” She said the solitary preparation creates a pause before the second half’s catastrophes, one marked by sensuality, lusciousness and conviviality. Guests arrive for a jolly dinner that lasts seconds, although the preparation has taken days. Laing said Donati always cooked his feasts alone and would not let anyone help.

Building Donati from fragments

Kushner asked whether Laing found details about Donati in a book or in the larger biography of Pasolini. Laing said she pieced him together from every available source. A Fellini book’s massive index contained three references to Donati, which she searched for small details.

Laing also watched documentaries, including Ciao, Federico, about Fellini. Donati crossed behind Fellini in the background. Laing froze the footage to inspect his clothes and described the figure as a ghost she had to chase. She said the material continued to arrive, but Donati had to be tracked down.

Pasolini at the edge

Kushner said the most productive and thrilling subjects remain ciphers, and that Laing used intuition effectively. Her reading also recalled Ninetto Davoli’s later interviews about Pasolini, particularly his movement between intellectuals and the ragazzi de vita on a football pitch.

Laing said Pasolini could not be central because he remains peripheral to Nico and Donati, although Nico becomes more fascinated by him. She read all the biographies but built her characterization from films and still photographs. Those images included Pasolini and his mother, Susanna, in their apartment in the EUR neighborhood. Laing recalled him tucked in like a little bird while Susanna patted him.

Laing said: “I didn't want to be bound by the thousands and thousands of interpretations of Pasolini. I wanted him to kind of pass like a cat through different scenes.”

Kushner described EUR as architectural work completed under Mussolini on the outskirts of Rome, while qualifying that this reflected her understanding. On a trip with an Italian friend to Ostia to see the site of Pasolini’s murder, she stopped first at a restaurant where Pasolini had had a beer. Waiters there sought to sanctify, recreate and memorialize him.

While standing at the death site, Kushner checked her iPhone and received an email from Ed Halter of Light Industry asking her to join a Pasolini homage. Kushner said she had never met Halter. She replied that she was at the site of his death.

Laing said she disliked death-site tourism generally, but found the Ostia site important, powerful and sad rather than kitsch. She omitted the murder because she considered a description grotesque. The novel instead moves through the moments leading to Ostia and the aftermath carried by radio reports and newspapers.

According to its own description, The Center for Fiction is a literary nonprofit based in Downtown Brooklyn. It supports readers and writers of all ages and histories and offers events, reading groups, writing workshops, a bookstore, café and bar, a library and the Writers Studio. Members receive invitations, discounts and access to the library collection.

• Olivia Laing. The center lists The Lonely City, Everybody, Funny Weather and the Sunday Times number one bestseller The Garden Against Time among Laing’s books. Their first novel, Crudo, won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Laing received the Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction in 2018, and their books have been translated into 21 languages.
• Rachel Kushner. The center lists The Hard Crowd, an essay collection; the novels The Mars Room, The Flamethrowers and Telex from Cuba; and the short-story collection The Strange Case of Rachel K. The Center for Fiction identifies Creation Lake as her latest novel and a New York Times bestseller.
• Kushner has won the Prix Médicis. She was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Folio Prize, and twice a finalist for the Booker Prize and the National Book Award in Fiction. Creation Lake was longlisted for the National Book Award. Kushner is a Guggenheim Foundation Fellow, received the Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and has had her books translated into 27 languages.

What does this change for readers of historical fiction?

Laing and Kushner’s conversation presents The Silver Book as a selective reconstruction rather than an exhaustive history of 1970s Italian cinema. Laing combines index entries, documentaries, photographs, biographies and gaps. Her most vivid figures emerge through peripheral appearances rather than exhaustive explanation.

Her refusal to depict Pasolini’s murder places a limit on the novel’s use of real suffering. That choice makes artistic labor, historical power and the ethics of representation central tests rather than background. The book’s wager is that art can hold political and private consequence without reducing either to explanation. That wager will determine whether The Silver Book offers a convincing ethics of making, or only a persuasive period reconstruction.