The Silver Book

Rezensionen / Stimmen

Like the script of an unwritten movie, voyeuristic, slick with 1970s decadence, glittering with shadows and unspoken sins, The Silver Book is lush, intense, wildly evocative; subtly freighted with emotional power and sensuality, it is simply their best book yet -- Philip Hoare The Silver Book is an astounding work. It's difficult to believe this isn't an eyewitness account: the characters appear to live and breathe in actual time and we experience with them all the erotic tensions, as well as the tragedies, involved in their defiant pursuit of beauty. The world of Fellini and Pasolini is uncannily resurrected in this visionary narrative -- Celia Paul Transporting, heartbreaking, beautiful. I did not want this story to end -- Nigel Slater Erotic romance, moviemaking audacity, and looming dread co-exist in this arresting fact-based novel set in Italy's hazardous 1970s.A mesmerizing, contemplative, and haunting work of historical fiction * Kirkus Reviews * An enchanted tale of an accursed era . . . In spare, subjective prose, with a deep appreciation of craft, material, texture, color, Laing brilliantly evokes Cinecitta when its creative masters were at their peak . . . The book manages to be both wonderfully escapist and a timely warning -- Lucy Sante This is a novel to fall in love with-at least I did-a canny hustler of a novel, brilliant, obsessive, hot, and yet it is also like the light on the water at night in Venice. This is the kind of novel you steal from your spouse or vice versa. And it is the work of an artist at the height of their powers, as if I could admire Laing more -- Alexander Chee By taking us on set during the filming of two of the strangest movies ever made, Olivia Laing's new novel makes us wonder all over again at how facts can be turned into fiction, then back once again into glittering and suggestive fact. A love story dedicated to cinema, to queerness, and to the alchemy of all good art -- Neil Bartlett Mercurial, voluptuous, and knowing, Olivia Laing's The Silver Book is at once a portrait of Rome at a volatile moment, with la dolce vita turning sour and the dreaded 'Years of Lead' on the horizon, and a love-letter to 70s Italian cinema, with a tight focus on Pasolini, its elegiac heart. Vibrant on so many levels, from the intellectual to the carnal and the poetic, The Silver Book will have you in a trance from the first page to the last. How can the novel possibly be dead when Laing is writing as beautifully as this? -- Rupert Thomson Such a haunting, sad but creatively thrilling tale, told with delicate economy -- Neil Tennant An enthralling read. So many exquisite images conjured and a driving sense of political and emotional passion. I loved it -- Maria Balshaw, Director of the Tate