still in an aw

Olivia Laing: The Silver Book. 

Olivia Laing is one of my all time favourite writers. Their book Crudo, a novel , was a very very memorable reading to me and of course I have read their more factual books, too, The Lonely City, was too a five star experience. 

This, The Silver Book, like Crudo, lies partially to the factual events and persons and partially fictional. The factual matters I did not know of beforehand, but I read of them after reading the book, now I know a little, not all,  but what I liked most in the book, reading the book,  was the atmosphere, the intensity of the wrting. 

The Silver Book is, as said, a fictional account of real things, a marriage of reality and film and cinema, one could say, a combination of things, happenings which are surreal and in the book there lies the names and bodies of Fellini, Pasolini, Danilo Donati, and the English boy Nicholas, after leaving London in haste, after horrid happenings, a death of a lover. Some names, persons, are from the real life some not (as is the whole of the book). What is real, what happened in the real life 1970´s in Italy, In Venice in Rome, I learned a little bit (Google, reviews) but as the real factual matters are in the blur, still, I decided not to care about that, not to concentrate on that (factuality)  and that decision was a easy to do, since the book takes the reader to it´s world, it´s fantasy, it´s surreality, it´s intense happenings. 

 Their writing is smooth, flowing, intense and I swept in the film making, in the horrors of war, fasiscm not to let aside the magnitude of the love story of Nicholas and Danilo. 

So, on a surface level it is a queer love story and noirish triller and one can take it as such since Olivia Laing can write. Their writing is sublime, beautiful, and their investigation into the difficult relationship between artifice and truth, illusion and reality, love and power is just a beautiful read.