Reviews with content warning for Rape - Одинокий город. Упражнения в искусстве одиночества

Enjoyed the concept and content. This book gave me new lenses to view artists I knew, like Warhol and Hopper, and introduced me to artists I didn’t, like Henry Darger. The ways the author explores the concept and experience of loneliness were also invaluable in giving me a new vocabulary to describe that place.

However—I found myself asking where in the world the editor was on many, many occasions. Most paragraphs in this book are 1-2 sentences, and that’s a reflection of sentence complexity, not paragraph brevity. This is interspersed with sometimes jarring affectations of writing like “What I am trying to say is…[restatement of something that was just said]”.

Ultimately I did enjoy The Lonely City but limiting to 3 stars because I found it hard to get past the clunky writing.

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effievee's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-paced

4.5

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owenwilsonbaby's review against another edition

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emotional hopeful reflective sad fast-paced

5.0

“God I was sick of carrying around a woman’s body, or rather everything that attaches to it.”

Wow! My copy is dog-eared from the countless quotes I wanted to remember and include here. What a beautiful and articulate piece of writing about analysing and challenging loneliness and what a delicate and finely-wrought talent for storytelling.

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literategirl's review against another edition

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emotional inspiring reflective medium-paced

5.0

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manicmeg's review against another edition

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challenging dark reflective slow-paced

2.5

I didn’t enjoy this but it was well written and researched. Will not pick up again

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tiagoalves's review against another edition

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informative reflective medium-paced

1.25

This book started well, fizzled out in the blink of an eye, and then ended horribly.

The blurb, that I read a few years ago, drew me in. Its first chapter, describing loneliness as a city in itself and beginning to explore that feeling in a city as born out of separation but also exposure was fantastic. Then Laing went into the biographical content that mostly built this book, rather than the memoir I was expecting alongside the study of loneliness in art.

We learn about the lives of Hopper, Warhol, Wojnarowicz, Solanas, Darger, and so on, but what we read is all very surface-level. It goes on interminable tangents that don’t seem to relate at all with the main point the book promises us, only then to fail miserably in considering the many nuances of loneliness, cowering solely behind the word ‘lonely’ and never having the boldness to explore anything else for over 250 pages.

This was researched, but the thing is that you can tell it was researched, and not in a good way. It reads as if Laing had googled ‘lonely’ and ‘new york’ and created an amalgamation of the results and divided them into chapters. The art analysis is paradoxically shallow and generic, while also being over-explained and too drawn out.

The problem is that Laing seems to promise to set out in one direction through the main road, but she chooses to go someplace else and uses a shortcut. She pours over an artist’s life for over 30 pages and then suddenly remembers “oh right, I have to relate this to loneliness and to me somehow” so she decides to say “this is why he was lonely and this is the same way I felt a few years after in the same street where he was once” and then dips. These short allusions to loneliness and to her own experience quickly started to feel like a cop out from actually reflecting on loneliness by herself—she resorted a bit too much to quotes from her sources and ended up not sharing much more than her generic, vague, and not too bound opinions.

Shout out to chapter six, which dealt with the HIV/AIDS epidemic, for being the best chapter in the book, but it couldn’t save this book.

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clarabooksit's review against another edition

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I’ve been ruminating on language, its fluidity and possibilities. How magnificent and frustrating is it that words can mean so many different things?

Which brings me to this book: THE LONELY CITY: ADVENTURES IN THE ART OF BEING ALONE by Olivia Laing. I picked it up because of its title. It’s a fantastic title.

I thought it was going to be a collection of essays about loneliness, primarily the author’s own, and the myriad ways that it transpires and affects our lives. I thought the focal point was going to be New York City as one of the most populous cities in the world and also one of the loneliest. I thought there was going to be adventure, nuance, well-crafted sentences and poignancy.

What I did not expect was that the operative word in the title was “art.”

This book is about lonely (white, male) artists who lived in NYC. (I didn’t finish the book, so it’s possible there’s diversity somewhere in it but I wouldn’t bet on it.)

While some of my expectations were sort of met—nuance, poignancy, a great deal of loneliness—I find myself disappointed. Is this my own fault? Entirely. But that title set up so much and my interpretation was all wrong.

Does that make this a bad book? No, of course not. Does it make it not for me? Mostly yes. This might be callous but misunderstood male artists are not my thing. (And they’re nearly all male—the few women are defined by their relationships to said male artists.)

This is well-crafted—Laing weaves history, art, biography and social critique beautifully—and if you’re interested in the art world, particularly the latter half of the 20th century in the U.S., this might be for you.

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