Curt's Read-Bag: The Second Plane - September 11: Terror and Boredom
Title: The Second Plane - September 11: Terror and Boredom
By: Martin Amis (Knopf, 211 pp.)
Concerning: A collection of essays, reviews and two short stories about the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Islamist fundamentalism and the post-9/11 landscape by the British novelist (who, among other thing, doesn’t care for the term “9/11”).
Quote: “I found myself frivolously wondering whether Osama was just the product of his family background - and more particularly, of his birth order. Seventeenth out of fifty-seven is a notoriously difficult slot to fill, and if the polygamous father is also an illiterate billionaire, then an appetite for conflict, among his older sons, should not surprise us.”
Verdict: I wonder if we’ll ever get the funny Martin Amis back? His sense of humor seems to have gone MIA since The Information (especially in his awful would-be satiric novel Yellow Dog). I get a sense that he likes to gravitate towards nonfiction subjects like Stalinist Russia (in his nonfiction book Koba the Dread) and Islamist terrorists not just because they represent such extremes of human belief and behavior, but because they so comfortably offer him a perch on the moral high ground. He offers some compelling portraits of Islamist extremism - his short story “The Last Days of Mohammed Atta” is very powerful - but some of his observations and reviews seem rote and predictable. He’s also surprisingly credulous in some areas, making me question his reliability: he digs up a statistic that 42% of Americans believe that the U.S. was literally responsible for the 9/11 attacks -- it’s hard to imagine him accepting such bullshit at face value. (Perhaps the question’s more ambiguous than he lets on.) On the plus side, he writes a terrific review of Paul Greengrass’s United 93 and I enjoyed his piece about traveling with Tony Blair, particularly the observation, “Interviewing the P.M., I was often disconcerted to find that I was doing most of the talking.”
Also: At one point he says “‘Sit room’ is not an American contraction along the lines of fry pan, sleep pill or shave cream.” Are those American contractions? I’ve never heard of them - maybe it’s a regional thing. (FYI, “Sit room” is for “Situation Room.”)
By: Martin Amis (Knopf, 211 pp.)
Concerning: A collection of essays, reviews and two short stories about the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center, Islamist fundamentalism and the post-9/11 landscape by the British novelist (who, among other thing, doesn’t care for the term “9/11”).
Quote: “I found myself frivolously wondering whether Osama was just the product of his family background - and more particularly, of his birth order. Seventeenth out of fifty-seven is a notoriously difficult slot to fill, and if the polygamous father is also an illiterate billionaire, then an appetite for conflict, among his older sons, should not surprise us.”
Verdict: I wonder if we’ll ever get the funny Martin Amis back? His sense of humor seems to have gone MIA since The Information (especially in his awful would-be satiric novel Yellow Dog). I get a sense that he likes to gravitate towards nonfiction subjects like Stalinist Russia (in his nonfiction book Koba the Dread) and Islamist terrorists not just because they represent such extremes of human belief and behavior, but because they so comfortably offer him a perch on the moral high ground. He offers some compelling portraits of Islamist extremism - his short story “The Last Days of Mohammed Atta” is very powerful - but some of his observations and reviews seem rote and predictable. He’s also surprisingly credulous in some areas, making me question his reliability: he digs up a statistic that 42% of Americans believe that the U.S. was literally responsible for the 9/11 attacks -- it’s hard to imagine him accepting such bullshit at face value. (Perhaps the question’s more ambiguous than he lets on.) On the plus side, he writes a terrific review of Paul Greengrass’s United 93 and I enjoyed his piece about traveling with Tony Blair, particularly the observation, “Interviewing the P.M., I was often disconcerted to find that I was doing most of the talking.”
Also: At one point he says “‘Sit room’ is not an American contraction along the lines of fry pan, sleep pill or shave cream.” Are those American contractions? I’ve never heard of them - maybe it’s a regional thing. (FYI, “Sit room” is for “Situation Room.”)