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A review by sarosecav
Everybody by Olivia Laing
5.0
“Pleasure is frightening, and so too is freedom. It involves a kind of openness and unboundedness that’s deeply threatening both to the individual and to the society they inhabit. Freedom invokes a counter-wish to clamp down, to tense up, to forbid, even to destroy.”
Extraordinary in scope and insight.
The book is a bit hard to describe or pin down—the central organizing theme is following the life and writing of psychoanalyst and activist (and eventually, pseudoscientist) Wilhelm Reich, but also the main freedom movements of the last century (feminism, civil rights, gay liberation), but also the author’s own life as a body—but despite its slipperiness, fascinating and well-written.
Like Reich, and like me in my newest book, Laing is trying to understand “the body itself: why it’s so difficult to inhabit, why you might want to escape or subdue it, why it remains a naked source of power, even now” and also how this power exists “not despite but because of [its] manifest vulnerabilities.”
Extraordinary in scope and insight.
The book is a bit hard to describe or pin down—the central organizing theme is following the life and writing of psychoanalyst and activist (and eventually, pseudoscientist) Wilhelm Reich, but also the main freedom movements of the last century (feminism, civil rights, gay liberation), but also the author’s own life as a body—but despite its slipperiness, fascinating and well-written.
Like Reich, and like me in my newest book, Laing is trying to understand “the body itself: why it’s so difficult to inhabit, why you might want to escape or subdue it, why it remains a naked source of power, even now” and also how this power exists “not despite but because of [its] manifest vulnerabilities.”