The War on Terrror with a G-String

[monk222]

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"The Unknown Terrorist" by Richard Flanagan looks like a promising novel, about a stripper girl trying to make good in the world and getting ensnared in the War on Terror in a criminal case of mistaken identity, thanks to a one-night stand with a stranger named Tariq. Nasty, violent, and topical - you cannot ask for more:

Although the basic outlines of this story come from Heinrich Böll’s novel “The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum,” written in response to the terrorism scares that Germany suffered in the late 1960s and ’70s, Mr. Flanagan has turned the story into an armature for a brilliant meditation upon the post-9/11 world, a globalized world in which fear is a valued commodity for terrorists and governments alike, a world in which rumors and misinformation circumnavigate the globe in the flash of an eye, and narratives — constructed by politicians and tabloid reporters, and avidly consumed by a spectacle-hungry populace — replace facts and truths. Identity has become a commodity and construct in this world: something that can be manufactured, stolen or counterfeited.

If you check it out at Amazon, you see it opens with a meditation on love, Jesus, and Nietzsche. I think this novel wants to crowd near the top of my reading wish list. I'm a sucker for love. And strippers.


(Source: MICHIKO KAKUTANI for The New York Times)

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