The leap into the terrorist mind appears too great for most authors
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1827490,00.html
Writers should be free to go beyond their own culture, but often the
necessary research has stifled their creativity
Natasha Walter
Monday July 24, 2006
The Guardian
John Updike's new novel, Terrorist, which reaches into the mind of a
would-be holy warrior, will surely tempt many of the same readers who
fell on Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown, which tells the story of a
terrorist assassin, and on Martin Amis's short story The Last Days of
Muhammad Atta, which tells an imagined account of the final hours of
the man who piloted one of the aeroplanes on September 11. It's not
surprising if people are hungry for these fictions. We go to these
novelists, who are some of the greatest writers of our time, in the
hope that they can flesh out a troubling emptiness - what drives people
to want to kill us.
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