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Although she is the same age, comes from a similar background, and has an important literary and critical body of work, she is far from being some kind of double. Just as there were two Marguerites (Yourcenar and Duras, opposed in every way), can we not say that there are two Annies?

Annie Ernaux and Annie Le Brun seem to represent two irreducible currents and approaches: one of the institutionalised left, a left that always holds power in the cultural milieu, and the other issuing from a left recalcitrant, something closer to anarchism but without claiming any label, and which, in fact, abhors them.  

Patrick Autréaux on Annie Ernaux and the late Annie Le Brun. Translated by Tobias Ryan.

It’s a story, of course, but also a description (not a review or a critique, but a description) of a film called, probably, The Colonel’s Son, a movie about (“don’t laugh,” the narrator says) zombies. The name of the story? “The Colonel’s Son,” as if—once you get past the narrator’s short opening musing on the movie and its meanings—the story and the movie are one and the same, or at least traveling along the same paths. “I swear it was the most democratic, the most revolutionary film I’d seen in ages, and I don’t say that because the film in itself revolutionized anything,” the narrator claims. In fact, the film is clichéd, obvious, coarse, and yet “every frame was infused with and gave off a revolutionary atmosphere, or rather an atmosphere in which you could sense the revolution, not in its totality, but a fragment, a miniscule, microscopic fragment of the revolution.” He offers up a comparison: imagine watching Jurassic Park and not only do the dinosaurs never show up, but they’re not even mentioned.

By Nicholas Rombes.

On opening it, we are there, on the other side. Not in a foreign country or one mired in war, in Apocalypse Now or Platoon, not in a place seen from a helicopter or one from which you wait to be extracted by the birds, of booby-trapped rice fields, or forests full of lean tigers and venomous snakes. We are there amongst the nasal-voiced soldiers we know from the movies: those whom we can barely see and who are everywhere. We are there in the jungle, with those who talk of weariness, love, exhaustion, and desertion, who erect altars for the dead, who are fragile and terrified, cowardly or superstitious, merciless and heroic; with the bô dôï who play cards, drink and smoke wicked weed and roses, who remember college friends and lovers, the little lakes of Hanoi and Nguyen Du Street, and with those who must hide from the political officials. Here we are on the other side, and still it’s humanity.

Patrick Autréaux on The Sorrow of War, the only novel by Vietnamese author Bao Ninh. Essay translated by Tobias Ryan.

At the end of the 1990s, the PKK were ejected from Syria, and Ocalan was abducted by the state forces of Turkey. He has been imprisoned there ever since,  the only inmate in the prison on Imrali Island, in the Sea of Marmara. During his incarceration, Ocalan’s thought developed considerably. He had begun as an orthodox Marxist-Leninist and led the PKK along these lines. In captivity, Ocalan meditated on the immense flaws in Soviet-style socialism as well as neoliberal capitalism, and sought other routes and options for his movement. 

By Ben Granger.