The world of 1970s Italian cinema is the glossy backdrop for an elegantly wrought but shallow novel
“U
gliness,” noted Pier Paolo Pasolini, “is never completely depressing or repulsive. It contains within it an allegory of hunger and pain, its history is our history, the history of Fascism … It is tragic, but immediate, and for this reason, full of life.” For Pasolini, ugliness was its own kind of truth, such that Rome could lay no claim to being the most beautiful city in the world “if it were not, at the same time, the ugliest”. For some, though, that truth risked becoming “unseeable”. The gaze of the touristic voyeur, said Pasolini, skimmed over slums for the poor “filled with illness, violence, crime, and prostitution”, “convinced of the extraneousness and untimeliness of this sub-proletarian, underdeveloped world”.
Olivia Laing’s second novel, The Silver Book, is a work preoccupied with beauty. Set in the world of Italian cinema in 1974, the book overflows with extravagant film sets, feasts, dazzling costumes. Even Pasolini himself, cruising around in his Alfa Romeo, oozes charisma and allure. But as Pasolini made clear, beauty without its opposite can only ever be incomplete.
The book opens at the peak of its art and intensity. For reasons initially withheld, Nicholas, the book’s callow protagonist, flees London for Italy. In Venice, he meets real-life set designer Danilo Donati, who takes him first as a lover and then as a paid assistant, whisking him off to the studio in Rome where Fellini is filming Casanova, then later to a remote villa, the setting for Pasolini’s notorious masterpiece of fascist brutality, Salò.
