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Chargement... Le deuxième avion: 11-Septembre : 2001-2007par Martin Amis
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Inscrivez-vous à LibraryThing pour découvrir si vous aimerez ce livre Actuellement, il n'y a pas de discussions au sujet de ce livre. This volume is a collection of essays and short stories written in response to the 2001 terrorist attacks. Amis, a novelist and outspoken critic of radical Islam, addresses controversial aspects of religion and war. The collection does include "Bush in Yes-Man's Land," "The Wrong War," as well as two stores, including "The Last Days of Muhammad Atta." The essays are presented to us in the same order they were originally first published and do include some violence. aucune critique | ajouter une critique
"The English language bows deeper to Amis than anyone else." The Daily Telegraph (UK) A master not only of fiction but also of fiercely controversial political engagement, Martin Amis here gathers fourteen pieces that constitute an evolving, provocative and insightful examination of the most momentous event of our time. At the heart of this collection is the long essay "Terror and Boredom," an unsparing analysis of Islamic fundamentalism and the West's flummoxed response to it, while other pieces address the invasion of Iraq, the realities of Iran and Tony Blair's pallid departure from Downing Street. Amis's reviews of pertinent books and films, from The Looming Tower to United 93, provide a wide-ranging survey of other responses to these calamitous issues, which are further explored in two short stories: "The Last Days of Mohammed Atta," and "In the Palace of the End," narrated by a Middle Eastern tyrant's double whose duties include epic lovemaking, grotesque torture and the duplication on his own body of the injuries sustained by his alter ego in constant assassination attempts. Whether lambasted for his refusal to kowtow to Muslim pieties or hailed for his blunt common sense, Amis is indisputably a great pleasure to read-informed, elegant, surprising-and this collection a resounding contemplation of the relentless, manifold dangers we suddenly find ourselves living with. Aucune description trouvée dans une bibliothèque |
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Google Books — Chargement... GenresClassification décimale de Melvil (CDD)974.879044History and Geography North America Northeastern U.S. Pennsylvania Southwest central counties; Bedford group SomersetClassification de la Bibliothèque du CongrèsÉvaluationMoyenne:
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From its opening lines, novelist Martin Amis' collection of essays and stories is concerned with the sensory experience and conceptual challenges of September 11, 2001, and with unpicking its sheer unfathomability. In tackling such a difficult topic, Amis is remarkably deft, steering away from every potential pitfall of mawkishness, polemic or unseemliness. Even in the short story 'The Last Days of Muhammad Atta', told from the perspective of one of the hijackers, he never submits to that false panacea of moral relativism into which so many of his peers sunk, and continue to wallow.
Indeed, Amis' surety only reminds you that there has been an alarming deficiency of quality cultural responses to this era-defining event, and when he laments on how the middle ground has moved over the years (pg. 198), it can be sobering to admit (there is an unremarked but ironical context in that the earlier pieces are published in the Guardian but the later ones in the Times, even though the author's outlook remains fundamentally the same). It makes you cherish anything that is genuinely trying to parse the events of that day, as opposed to the deluge of cant and emotiveness which colours most of our cultural discussion.
The essays and stories here are very readable, even when talking about impossibly harsh realities (when, for example, he asks in a review of the film United 93, was the last time you saw a commercial flight without any children on it?). Their conceptual lucidity and political sobriety (traits Amis shared with his good friend Christopher Hitchens) leads you to wonder if perhaps one of the greatest losses to our culture in the post-9/11 period has been the eclipse of the tough-minded old-school liberal lefties. Their hair-trigger-sensitive, identity-driven pseudo-academic heirs, the 'woke' progressive posturers, serve only to hammer home the defeat of that Tuesday morning again and again in their increasingly petty ways. In the afore-mentioned short story (pg. 121), Amis reproduces the recording of Muhammad Atta as he took command of the plane that he would soon pilot into the North Tower. "We have some planes," he says, to keep the worried passengers contained. They did not know the reality of the new world. They did not have the second plane; indeed, they had not yet experienced the first. "Just stay quiet, and you'll be okay." It was wrong then and it is wrong now. ( )