Sublime ... The beating heart of The Silver Book is Nicholas and Donati’s love story. Laing affectingly renders this mentor-apprentice relationship, exploring the complexity of its vulnerabilities, jealousies and petty frustrations. But where the book really soars is in its visceral portrait of Italian renegade filmmaking ... Given the extravagance of this world, it might have been tempting to use a maximalist style to match the material. Instead, Laing’s prose is taut and cleareyed, even at its most sensational.
That past haunts [the protagonist] at narratively convenient moments throughout the novel, but the mystery hinted at early on proves itself to be little more than a MacGuffin, a cinematic device used to move the plot along rather than unlock significant meaning ... Abrupt mood changes start to feel more tied to plot necessities than anything that took place in [the] previous scene ... Clearly well-researched and replete with details about Fellini, Pasolini, Donati, and the making of these films ... Things get a bit credulous, logistically and logically, when the historic theft of dozens of film reels gets shoehorned into the plot, but the novel’s biggest swing comes when its focus changes in the final act to a discussion of Italian politics.
Possesses a tangle of compelling themes ... The deft plotting in Laing’s novel keeps readers engaged in not only the personal lives of the characters, but also in the larger political questions the story persistently stirs up ... All in all, Laing’s novel is a beautiful, terrifying, wonderful work of fiction.
Accomplished ... Feels like a precision-controlled environment. In taut sentences, Laing evokes the sensuous eroticism and incipient danger of a 1970s Italian setting, moving towards a shattering conclusion ... Rigorously researched and realised ... This is a better, richer novel than its predecessor.
Laing’s skill is to select details and put them into stronger focus ... What can the novelist offer that the biographer cannot? In Laing’s case, it is economy of words: a prose that pares down and transforms the messiness of the real into sentence after sentence of unforced lucidity. Descriptive writing can often seem laboured, but the author’s scene-setting is managed with deftness ... This is a gripping novel that is, in many ways, a technical tour de force. Few writers can sustain such pace while using the potentially static-feeling historic present tense ... A distilled take on reality that is ultimately an illusion, not simply because of the things it makes up, but because it irons out complexities in its pursuit of beauty.
The feelings that 'Whatever' engenders—the exasperation and the sour apathy—are similar to what I felt reading Olivia Laing’s new work of fiction, The Silver Book ... None of this is new, or shocking, or fresh; and it’s this lack of surprise, of insight, that depletes the urgency that could have been gleaned from such fascinating subject matter ... It’s too bad that Laing wrote The Silver Book through the eyes of the wrong man.
At its best, Laing’s writing is urgent and elegantly wrought ... As the novel strains to take on more challenging material, these morsels of image and event begin to feel measly and insubstantial ... Working in constrained space, Laing compiles lists in place of living description .. This cursory, free-associative language is not how a person who experienced the war would recall it; it is how someone with only a very limited knowledge of the war would fail to imagine it. It is also precisely the point at which the deeper inadequacy of Laing’s taxonomic method is exposed ... A novel distorted by the medium it has shaped itself to flatter: it is an Instagram feed bound between book covers. There can be no ugly, unseeable truth here; only the artful pose is of value..
An arresting narrative about art, filmmaking, and desire in 1970s Italy ... 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.
The book starts in motion, as is only appropriate for a work set in the world of movie making … This is a world of aesthetes and The Silver Book has an aesthetic beauty to match … There’s a noirish thrill to the twists and reveals of its second half … And there’s a palpable lushness to Laing’s use of language that mirrors the carnal pursuits of their characters.
As a novel, it feels a little lacklustre. At times, the plot feels like a loose scaffold for Laing’s compendium of self-conscious historic signifiers ... Laing is a masterful essayist, always keenly attuned to queer art history’s most interesting figures, and The Silver Book is, ultimately, a timely exploration of the persistence of art under political duress – but it might have been a more satisfying book if Laing had chosen the form in which they most excel, the essay, instead.
Anyone familiar with Laing’s exquisite nonfiction work...will be unsurprised by the unforced lyricism of their latest novel, a shimmering work that is part love story, part thriller ... Laing’s novel is very readable ... Essentially, it’s a cautionary tale about fascism.
Poignant and richly told ... Less concerned with explicating the mystery than with brilliantly articulating the abundance of creativity that flowed among the artists and the political terror of the time they lived in. Erotic and compelling, Laing’s novel offers an intoxicating look at the people, emotions and exquisite but often bitter details behind the dream-making machinery of Italian cinema.
It’s an intriguing plot, but most notable is Laing’s lucid showcasing of the artists’ fervent yet tender collaborations ... The author’s fans will adore this.
