Queer Desire in Cinecittà

In Olivia Laing’s new novel, two men meet in Venice. Across art, cinema, and political violence, a story unfolds about power, illusion, and uncompromising desire. One is a young English artist who fled London penniless. The other is the visionary Danilo Donati, a costume designer and production designer for Pier Paolo Pasolini and Federico Fellini, a magician of Italian cinema. What begins as an unexpected encounter soon leads into a world where life and staging blur into one another.

Between Dream Factory and Political Violence

Their longing strikes them both immediately. Together they travel to Rome and indulge in the intoxicating dream-world of Cinecittà. The Italian film world appears as a place of almost limitless possibilities. Between lightness and fantasy, they dive into a life where art, work, and love are barely separable.
Yet the glittering world begins to crack. Italy is in the politically charged Years of Lead. The lavish life, the work, and the love draw the two men ever deeper into a perilous labyrinth. Opaque powers operate there with terrifying brutality.
Against Italy’s seductive backdrop, “Book of Dreams” tells of the closeness between beauty and violence, between loneliness and power, and of a desire that admits no compromise. Laing fuses the dream-world of cinema with the political abysses of a specific era. The novel is now available in a German translation by Thomas Mohr from Insel Verlag in Berlin as a 268-page hardcover edition for €26, and as an e-book for €21.99. A sample is available on the publisher’s page.

Olivia Laing, born in 1977, is nonbinary and works as an internationally renowned writer and critic. Laing is a member of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded the Windham Campbell Prize in 2018. The books have been translated into 21 languages. In German, the most recent titles include “The Lonely City,” “Crudo,” and “The Garden and Time.” The latter became a Sunday Times bestseller and won the Wainwright Prize.