Publishers Weekly
03/02/2020
This timely collection from Laing (The Trip to Echo Spring) asks “Can art do anything, especially during periods of crisis?” She shows that, indeed, art can change things for the better, pinning her assertion on critic Eve Sedgwick’s concept of “reparative reading,” which encourages readers to use hope, creativity, and survival in their interpretations. Broken up into sections that include artist profiles, literary criticism, and personal essay, the book shows where art can fight back, as with painter David Wojnarowicz’s writing and photography documenting his former partner’s death from AIDS at a time of political inaction. Thanks to the short length of her essays, she’s able to cover a lot of ground, touching on, in addition to the AIDS crisis, climate change, gender, and in two especially biting selections, the plight of refugees in the U.K. and the Grenfell Tower fire in London. Laing soars in her writing on Maggie Nelson, whom she describes as creating an “exhilarating new language for considering both the messiness of life and the meanings of art.” As a collection that aims to exemplify “new ways of seeing” to break through a “spin cycle of terrified paranoia,” this will leave readers eager to reengage with art they know well, and explore art as yet new to them. (May)
A. V. Club
"Laing opens each piece with a deceptive ease [and] alights upon poetic insights... [H]er light touch throughout these essays makes room for some stunning perceptions."
Evening Standard - Susannah Butter
"A thought-provoking, inspiring collection that you can go back to whenever the weather takes a funny turn."
Irish Times - Mia Colleran
"Funny Weather gives the reader a tangible sense of the sprawling garden of work which Laing has planted. She is to the art world what David Attenborough is to nature: a worthy guide with both a macro and micro vision, fluent in her chosen tongue and always full of empathy and awe."
Vulture - Hillary Kelly
"[Olivia Laing is] a kind of cultural sage...an accidental literary grande dame of the emotional havoc wrought by late capitalism and digital disconnect... Laing is radically empathetic, a writer-activist."
Philip Hoare
"I yield to absolutely no one in my admiration of Olivia Laing; her essays are magical liberations of words and ideas, art and love; they’re the essence of great twenty-first century literature: brilliantly expressed, wildly uncontained, willful, and wonderfully unbound."
James Lasdun
"Like all great critics, Olivia Laing combines formidable intelligence with boundless curiosity and fabulous taste, but she also has a rare quality of intimacy; an ability to connect the reader to a work of art or literature (or for that matter a facet of life itself) with a directness that lights it up like nothing else. It’s why I read her."
NPR - Annalisa Quinn
"These essays showcase Laing as an imaginative and empathetic critic of the arts. She gets at texture, technique, feeling, and politics all at once... It's a pleasure to follow Laing as she pokes around companionably, examining the things that interest her."
Hyperallergic - Lily Meyer
"As exterior life shuts temporarily down, Funny Weather is an immensely useful reminder that new space can be intellectual as well as physical.… Laing animates her prose with concise, brainy descriptions of visual art.… Laing is a tremendously gifted genre-mixer, and her writing flourishes most when its topic requires her both to observe and to imagine.… Funny Weather is an invitation to Laing’s imaginary museum, where minds if not bodies meet, and where true hospitality resides."
Observer - Alina Cohen
"Laing writes of her creative subjects in a winning, passionate voice that proves both soothing and galvanizing, especially amid a panic.… It’s not just art we need in an emergency, but writers, like Laing, who gently guide our eyes to what’s out there."
John Glassie
"Laing’s arts writing is sharp-minded, and her manner is generous toward both subject and reader."
A.V. Club
"Laing opens each piece with a deceptive ease [and] alights upon poetic insights.… [H]er light touch throughout these essays makes room for some stunning perceptions."
Sarah Schulman
"A fine writer’s embrace of the artists who preceded her, friendly visits with their lives, and loving acknowledgement of their foundational contributions. A work of joy in recognition."
Telegraph
"An incisive meditation on the value of heartfelt, messy art in our paranoid times."
Library Journal
05/01/2020
This collection of art, literary, and cultural criticism by essayist and novelist Laing (The Lonely City) explores difficult material. Many of the themes—loneliness, alcoholism, the frailties of the human body, gender relations, runaway technology—long predate the contested politics implied in the subtitle (Brexit, the Trump presidency). Laing asserts this is not a depressing book, however, and finds inspiration in the work of the (mostly contemporary UK and U.S.) visual artists and writers profiled, creators who propose new ways of seeing via art that responds to crisis with generosity and engagement, art that is reparative. Many of the bracing, unflinching essays examine the lives of artists working in extremis, such as terminal illness (Derek Jarman, Kathy Acker) or disability (Sargy Mann, a painter who lost his eyesight). Readers will value Laing's talent for writing with equal discernment about the very different media of painting and sculpture on the one hand and fiction on the other (e.g., Jean-Michel Basquiat and Georgia O'Keeffe, Hilary Mantel and Ali Smith). She draws perceptive insights from the biographical details of the artists' lives, sketching them in incisive profiles. VERDICT An excellent introduction both to the work of a fine cultural critic and to the creative figures discussed. [See Prepub Alert, 11/11/19.]—Michael Dashkin, New York
Kirkus Reviews
★ 2020-01-26
A stellar collection of essays and reviews from the award-winning London-based writer.
Laing, the winner of the 2018 Windham-Campbell Prize for nonfiction, is often described as a cultural critic, but insofar as the term suggests a sole focus on the arts, it belies the wider sweep of these pieces, most of them previously published. A graceful stylist and superb reporter, the author is a journalist in the spirit of Michael Dirda, who calls himself “an appreciator” rather than a critic, and Laing includes no negative reviews here. Nonetheless, there’s plenty of first-rate arts criticism in her appreciations of painters like David Hockney and Jean-Michel Basquiat and novelists Patricia Highsmith and Sally Rooney along with musings on topics like gardening and a standout essay on the surrealistic horrors faced by an asylum-seeking refugee who spent 11 years “trapped in Britain’s infinite detention system.” Laing’s aesthetic tastes lean toward idiosyncratic or transgressive work that involves links between art and disaster, whether a crisis imperils the human body or the body politic. Disease and death stalk her pages—Kathy Acker’s breast cancer, Freddie Mercury’s AIDS, Georgia O’Keeffe’s agoraphobia, and Hilary Mantel’s migraines—but she brings a fresh and humane eye even to ills exhaustively covered elsewhere, such as David Bowie’s cocaine addiction. Afflicted with corneal edema, the painter Sargy Mann “took a hair dryer to the National Gallery, plugged it in and calmly dried his soggy, waterlogged eye in order to see the paintings.” Laing sinks only briefly into lit-crit jargon in discussions of “reparative reading,” and sometimes her enthusiasms run away with her. Were the 700 or so poems by Frank O’Hara truly “as original and lovely as anything of the century”? Still, the author’s praise never appears less than genuine or unsupported by deep observation, and she consistently shows the talent James Wood ascribed to Mantel: She has “the maddeningly unteachable gift of being interesting.”
Vibrant commentary on art and society by a writer with a sharp eye for the offbeat.
