Laboring in the Dream Factory

Harry Stecopoulos reviews Olivia Laing’s new novel “The Silver Book.”

By Harry StecopoulosNovember 16, 2025

• Fiction

Editor’s note: This review contains spoilers.

¤

HAVE YOU WATCHED—or attempted to watch—Salò (1975), Pier Paolo Pasolini’s cinematic adaptation of the Marquis de Sade’s 120 Days of Sodom? Did you stare at the torture and the sex, the blood and the effluvia, animating this grueling portrayal of fascism? If not, you may want to do so after reading Olivia Laing’s new novel The Silver Book, an arresting narrative about art, filmmaking, and desire in 1970s Italy. Unlike Pasolini, Laing doesn’t scandalize; no one will ban The Silver Book or denounce it from the pulpit. Yet Laing devotes almost half of their novel to a fictional account of the making of Pasolini’s most notorious film and closes the text with a news photograph of the auteur’s funeral. The Silver Book takes seriously Salò and the contemporaneous Fellini’s Casanova (1976) not because they are those two great directors’ best films—The Gospel According to St. Matthew (1964) and La Dolce Vita (1960) rightly earn more accolades—but because Laing locates in these mid-1970s works a queer aesthetic of great political import.

Written in a terse yet lyrical style, The Silver Book centers on the relationship of the fictional Nicholas Wade, a 22-year-old English artist, and the historical figure Danilo Donati (1926–2001), the Academy Award–winning costume and production designer who brought plaster and gauze and wood to life on the screen. Their May–December romance—from Venetian seduction to artistic collaboration and eventual breakup—gives more structure to the novel than a vaguely gothic melodrama involving the death of Nicholas’s English lover. Organized through short sections apportioned across four “acts,” The Silver Book doesn’t worry much about conventional notions of plot. Cinematic production provides the novel’s action, and Laing does an excellent job of finding a compelling narrative in the creation of sketches, props, costumes, sets, and reels. Shimmery and dreamlike, The Silver Book lives up to the promise of its name.

This emphasis on cinematic illusion and artifice also structures Laing’s conception of political culture. In the novel, “film is strange,” not only because it pushes “beyond realism” but also because, like the “giant gold sun with beaten metal rays” made by Donati for Fellini’s Casanova, it signifies as “camp and gorgeous”—in other words, as queer, and thus, in this world, antiauthoritarian. Pasolini is, unsurprisingly, the gay leftist star of the novel (I’ll turn to Laing’s representation of him in a moment), but Donati and the set builders, prop specialists, and effect technicians at Cinecittà Studios also contribute to the expression of an oppositional politics. Their capacity to create alternative worlds onscreen, whether horrific, as in Salò, or whimsical, as in Casanova, contributes to a nonnormative counterculture that rejects the pain and misery of the “Anni di Piombo,” or “Years of Lead”—a time when, as Donati puts it, “everyone in Italy” was “more radical, more angry.” Like the French protesters six years earlier, Donati and his collaborators maintain an activist faith in the credo “All power to the imagination,” if in an emphatically queer mode.

To be sure, the creation of films like Casanova and Salò makes manifest “the cost of illusion.” Salò takes a particular toll on Nicholas and, in a different way, Donati. The Silver Book doesn’t spend time cataloging the film’s violence. The curious reader will have to seek out the movie to witness the blood and brutality. Instead, Laing has us share in Nicholas’s “disorientations” as he navigates the changing locations, admixture of 1930s and ’70s design, outrageous props (“false breasts, testicles, nipples, scalps”), and extravagant costumes (a golden yoke with stylized ram heads) that typify Salò’s creation. What bothers Nicholas most is that Pasolini, Donati, and the other film workers aren’t troubled by the subject matter. As the narrator tells us, “no matter what’s happening on set—a rape, a murder, the abasement of naked bodies—it is all treated with absolute neutrality, as if it’s just so much matter to animate and light.”

Nicholas’s uneasiness about this sort of artistic work comes to a head during a funny but telling discussion about the challenge of creating fake excrement for the “Circle of Shit” sequence, the third portion of Salò. Regular chocolate won’t do because “even the finest Swiss melts under the lights,” so Donati and Sergio, the effects maestro, debate how best to produce these props, prompting Nicholas’s disgust. The two men find the young Brit’s discomfiture ridiculous and remind him of their shared responsibility as “builders,” not “viewers,” of film. “We’re not perverts,” Danilo instructs, “we’re labourers in the dream factory!” The simulation of horrific acts and objects—sexual assault, degradation, shit—doesn’t offend these artists. Normative bourgeois constraints have little relevance to 1970s Italian cinema, and this openness, for Laing as for their characters, exemplifies the queer erotics that informs virtually every aspect of these productions. Even Fellini, nominally heterosexual, can’t resist flirting with Nicholas at their first meeting.

That said, Donati, for all his filmmaking experience and worldly sophistication, also grows uneasy while working on Salò and refuses to watch the footage as it’s being edited. Staging a theater of rape and murder doesn’t bother him. Instead, Donati finds it hard to accept Salò’s refusal of linear history. For Donati, Salò demonstrates “that there is a porosity to time that talk of historic eras, discrete moments succeeding one another, can only imperfectly conceal.” The recognition of this temporal “porosity” proves particularly troubling because the savage Salò, although set during the 1940s—the title refers to Mussolini’s short-lived puppet regime, the Republic of Salò (1943–45)—also has a more contemporary resonance. As Donati explains to Nicholas, the film reminds him that “fascism never really went away, it just changed form, went underground, periodically exploding back into the daylight.” As Laing emphasizes, by resituating The 120 Days of Sodom in a World War II context, Pasolini tries to teach his era about the historical tenacity of Italian fascism.

Laing hardly discounts the personal consequences of the filmmaking experience. Donati and Nicholas’s relationship grows shaky after the Englishman sleeps with Pasolini and then develops a minor obsession with the director. A later betrayal by Donati complicates matters even more. Yet Pasolini proves most important to The Silver Book as a charismatic political artist, not as a character deeply involved with the principal figures. Toward the end of the novel, Donati references Pasolini’s “What Is This Coup D’état? I Know,” the famous late essay published in the Italian newspaper Il Corriere della Sera that decried the resurgence of the Right but also indicted the superficiality of late 20th-century capitalist life. As Donati explains to Nicholas, “he attacks modernity, he puts it on trial. He thinks consumerism is a new fascism because there is so much violence hidden inside it, because it destroys nature and natural behaviour. It’s the same as Salò.”

Pasolini’s willingness to indict powerful elements in Italian society is, for Laing as for so many commentators over the decades, a possible reason for his murder by a male sex worker in 1975. But rather than turn The Silver Book into a mystery—a subplot about stolen film reels notwithstanding—Laing instead affirms their commitment to a similar politics and has the two principals engage the director’s vision. Donati shares with Nicholas a moving quotation from Pasolini’s last interview in the Italian newspaper La Stampa: “[W]e are all guilty, because we are all ready to play at slaughtering each other, as long as we are able to own everything at the end of the slaughter.” But then, the novelist follows Pasolini’s own historical method and extends the lesson about communal complicity in the violence of late capitalism to a later historical period, the 21st century. The author’s note on the last page stresses Pasolini’s “warnings about a system in which we are all enmeshed, and which has only grown more powerful in the past half-century.” Like their subject, Laing believes that art has a responsibility to warn everyone, but particularly the most vulnerable members of society, of an imminent threat.

The writer may hope that their reader closes The Silver Book pondering this cautionary message in light of Pasolini’s murder and the grief it inspires among all the principal characters—and, indeed, across Rome itself. The photograph of Pasolini’s funeral included at the end of the novel shows Piazza Campo de’ Fiori overflowing with mourners. Yet the last short section of act four strikes a very different note. Rather than conclude in an overtly political manner, Laing returns Nicholas to London, where we see him watching Fellini’s Casanova and remembering the props and sets from the studio. “He sits in the dark,” the narrator informs us, “and watches his own life unfold. […] There are whole sections he never saw made, but even they are filled with things he knows. Casanova’s pink coat. Danilo’s magic mirror, the ridiculous rhino that Ettore was so proud of. Perhaps his paintings are at the back of a set, he can’t tell.”

Nicholas delights not in the plot or in the performances but in the “things” that populate Casanova. Like Fellini, like Donati, he finds value in “a cinema of paper and scissors,” a cinema of art and craft, and that value is in its way no less political than Pasolini’s explicit allegory.

In the novel, Donati’s vision of Casanova veers wildly between scholarly accuracy and outrageous fancy. Nicholas and Donati first bond over making precise drawings of Venetian churches and palazzi that will later become the basis for Fellini’s massive sets. This is typical of the designer’s method: he will spend hours studying the image of an “ornate, overwrought” mirror in order to understand how to replicate it. He will reproduce the same sorts of dyes and fabrics used in 18th-century clothing. As the narrator explains, “each object is a formal problem that only he can decode” and, once decoded, transform into an “authentic illusion.” This is Donati’s historicism—an obsessiveness so extreme that it resists easy commodification.

Yet, in the words of the narrator, if Donati knows “when to cleave to the record,” he also knows when to be “splendidly anachronistic,” when to indulge his “easy, unfussy camp” sensibility. At one point, the “magician” of the cinema, as Fellini dubs him, follows the director’s suggestion and creates an enormous papier-mâché “whale with its mouth open, inside which a giantess abides.” This huge prop, used for Casanova’s London circus sequence, doesn’t speak directly to either the 18th or the 20th century; it doesn’t signify in overt political or historical terms. Instead, the whale exists as play, as an absurdly grand gesture that, like Donati’s recreation of Venice itself (St. Mark’s, Grand Canal, and all), is meant to delight and divert the eye. The “builders” of cinema always create with the “viewers” in mind.

If The Silver Book seems to ask, at times, where we might find a Pasolini for the 2020s—a queer leftist who can teach us how and what to resist—the shift to Fellini’s whimsical extravaganza offers us the other side of the dialectic: an insistence on outrageous spectacle with no explicit historical or political agenda. Unlike Pasolini, Fellini never invokes or suggests a connection between the famed lover’s 18th-century Europe and 1970s Italy. There is no historical allegory, disjunctive or otherwise, at work. As the narrator explains with reference to Donati’s costumes, “his clothes are a portal, not a historical re-enactment.” At most, Donati imagines, Fellini “has perceived the vast impoverishment of a culture of excess and he wants to stick the audience’s head into a jewelled bucket of regurgitated wine.” But this impulse is also a license to create “a world […] saturated with decoration”—a dazzling display of brilliant color and “preposterous scale”—for the sheer “fun” of it. Fellini may find fault with “a culture of excess,” but he has no trouble contributing to it at the same time.

And this, finally, may be the lesson of The Silver Book as well: not only to offer a pointed political message, however important that message might be, but also to provide the reader with a rich and luminous narrative, a glittering story that can—like film, like all art—take the reader away from the terrors of early-21st-century life.