On International Workers’ Day, we chart the cultural changes from moments of humanity at Wernham Hogg to grim visions of a more brutal post-Covid reality
Yui Sakuma makes a quirky character relatable in Ryohei Yoshino’s earnest coming-of-age drama about a college student who’s out of touch with her peers.
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Albert and the Whale
, by Philip Hoare (Pegasus). This idiosyncratic account of the life, work, and afterlife of the Renaissance artist Albrecht Dürer considers âhow art imagines our world.â Hoare shows Dürerâs responsiveness to his times. Copernicus and Martin Luther had ushered in a world âshifting nervously in space,â and printing (the âcurrencyâ of Dürerâs fame) and trade fostered unprecedented connectivity. Hoare also places his subject in a surprising lineage of artists including William Blake, Marianne Moore, Thomas Mann, and Andy Warhol. These comparisons elucidate Dürerâs radicalism, and establish him as a revolutionary and thoroughly modern artist. Hoare writes, âBefore Dürer, dragons existed; after him, they did not.â
Sat 15 May 2021 04.00 EDT
What has become of the office? Its small, mundane daily rituals, its smells – of over-boiled coffee, synthetic fabrics, other people’s perfume – the low hum of phone conversations and the whirring of the printer. To those of us who are still working from home, it feels like a faraway place, a half-forgotten memory, and to those who have returned it is utterly transformed: masked, distanced, hushed.
It’s a strange time to be appraising the workplace novel. Will things return to how they were before, or will we look back on our time of working long, gruelling hours in the office with relief, or even nostalgia? I wonder if books set in offices will make us wistful about some aspects of pre-pandemic life or if, instead, these narratives will act as a warning against returning to a working culture that felt, to many of us, unreliable and unstable.