Wednesday on Zenda. Wednesday of foreign non-fiction. This Wednesday focuses on The Silver Book, the latest work by English author Olivia Laing (Chalfont Saint Peter, Buckinghamshire, 1977), translated into Spanish by Albert Fuentes for the publisher Alpha Decay. Locating the action in 1970s Italy and told through the experiences of a young Englishman fleeing his past and himself, Laing reflects on the powers of the almost mythic fascination of art, especially when one approaches it under the logics of desire.
«It is dangerous to desire someone so much. She has known it all along, since the first night.»
The publisher herself points out about the work: “September 1974. After hastily leaving London, the young Nicholas arrives in Venice, where he happens to meet Danilo Donati, the legendary costume designer and production designer who brought to life the visions of Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini. Danilo has traveled to the city to prepare the first sketches for Casanova, and a young artist eager to learn is precisely what he needs.”
Together they move to Rome and to the Cinecittà studios, that immense theater of illusions where Fellini’s Venice rises on cardboard and Styrofoam. There, among sets, lights and costume tests, Nicholas discovers a dazzling world populated by filmmakers, actors and technicians, while his relationship with Danilo grows more intimate. Soon after, the two will accompany Pasolini during the filming of Salò, the disturbing parable about fascism that would be his final movie.
But Nicholas has arrived in Italy fleeing from something. While the country traverses the Years of Lead, the young man’s past begins to crack the fragile universe built on artifice.
With hypnotic prose and an extraordinary recreation of 1970s Italian cinema, Olivia Laing crafts a tale of love, desire and obsession in which beauty and violence, art and imposture, advance inseparably until they blur into one another.”
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Author: Olivia Laing. Title: The Silver Book. Translation: Albert Fuentes. Publisher: Alpha Decay. Sales: All Your Books.