RUTH AYLETT admires the blunt honesty with which a woman’s experience is recorded, but detects the unexamined privilege that underlies it
Latest editorial
Not sympathetic enough
DENNIS BROE puts into broader context The Sympathiser, a novel HBO series which attempts to insert more objectivity into the depiction of the US during the Vietnam war, its aftermath and its lingering mythologies
duo
IAN SINCLAIR draws attention to the powerful role that literature plays in foreseeing the way humanity will deal with climate crisis
High quality pulp, rollicking online murders, Abnorman Britain, and high skates drama: reviews of The Get Off, Everyone In The Group Chat Dies, Pagans and First To Fall
DENNIS BROE notes what happens to content when the streaming giants incorporate AI and deregulation into their economic models
New releases from The Tenementals, Nik Bartsch’s Ronin, and Kuunatic
SCOTT ALSWORTH hears the call to burn down and rebuild the video game industry from the bottom up
The Chinese language only introduced a feminine pronoun in the 1920s. Now, it might adopt a gender-inclusive one, suggests JANET DAVEY
HBO’s The Sympathiser from the Pulitzer Prize Winning Novel by Viet Thanh Nguyen opens with a quote: “All wars are fought twice, once on the battlefield and the second time in memory.”
It’s not simply memory that the book and the series are concerned with though; it’s “representation,” that is social memory refracted through in this case a hostile media which often exists to “correct” the sins and failures of bloody imperial overreach.
“On the battlefield,” Vietnam was lost by the US and its tiny number of — by the conclusion of the war — collaborators, although the cost was high with over one million Vietnamese killed for the crime of wanting to free their country from first French and then US domination.
More from this author
MICHAL BONCZA recommends a compact volume that charts the art of propagating ideas across the 20th century
MICHAL BONCZA reviews Cairokee gig at the London Barbican
MICHAL BONCZA rounds up a series of images designed to inspire women
