Martin Amis has been one of my favorite writers for almost twenty years now. This brilliant British writer and sympathetic observer of America has published an engaging story about September 11 terrorist leader Muhammad Atta in the April 24 edition of the The New Yorker. It’s an unsparing fictional portrait of Atta, but one that nevertheless attempt to understand his state of mind. Here is one important passage:

The core reason was of course all the killing–all the putting to death….He was thinking of the war, the wars, the war cycles that would flow from this day. He didn’t believe in the Devil, as an active force, but he did believe in death. Death, at certain times, stopped moving at its even pace and broke into a hungry, lumbering run.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 10th, 2006 at 9:57 am and is filed under Books/Literature.