Laboring in the Dream Factory

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.