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A review by theardentone
Everybody: A Book about Freedom by Olivia Laing
3.0
3.5 stars. Olivia Laing's writing style is beautiful and made me want to round up, but in the end this one was just not my favourite of hers.
This book felt weaker to me than their essay collecion "Funny Weather" and previous analytical/art-critical non-ficion title "The Lonely City", mainly because I felt that the different people she discussed in this book were only strenuously linked, and how their life stories interacted with the concept of freedom and the body was analysed but much less deeply than I would have liked. This left me with a feeling that the book didn't deliver on what I thought it promised, and remained on a surface level. This was especially so in contrast to Maggie Nelson's book "On Freedom", which is still fresh in my mind from when I read it a couple months ago, and which I believe offers much deeper insights into freedom, art, sexuality and society.
This book felt weaker to me than their essay collecion "Funny Weather" and previous analytical/art-critical non-ficion title "The Lonely City", mainly because I felt that the different people she discussed in this book were only strenuously linked, and how their life stories interacted with the concept of freedom and the body was analysed but much less deeply than I would have liked. This left me with a feeling that the book didn't deliver on what I thought it promised, and remained on a surface level. This was especially so in contrast to Maggie Nelson's book "On Freedom", which is still fresh in my mind from when I read it a couple months ago, and which I believe offers much deeper insights into freedom, art, sexuality and society.