Liquid Love: On the Frailty of Human Bonds by Zygmunt Bauman
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
Liquid Love is an ambitious book. It tries to tackle the contemporary problem of the “frailty of human bonds” in its microscopic but also trans-social implications. In other words, it studies how capitalist society has made people more reluctant to form close bonds (so that they can easily “buy” new ones with minimum possible pain inflicted), to how cities are built in a way to distance people from each other and disallow strangers from stop being strangers, to how nation-states are treating immigrants (a problem that I have seen in Greece as well as Denmark manifest itself in exactly the same way).
I liked the book but I found it difficult to follow a lot of the time, that’s why I’ve been reading it on and off for more than, ooh, one and a half years? Zygmunt Bauman is very quotable in some parts of the book but when he’s not I found I couldn’t catch his drift at all, I may have read two pages without understanding anything. That may come down to a lack of sophistication on my part; there did seem to be some sort of underlying premise in the four chapters but a lot of the time that premise was sort of rendered irrelevant.
Those said, I must agree with the summary on the back-cover: “It will be of great interest to students and scholars of sociology and in the social sciences and humanities generally, and it will appeal to anyone interested in the changing nature of human relationships.”
