Susana Araújo's book Transatlantic fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror has received "ESSENTIAL" rating from US LIBRARY JOURNAL CHOICE
FULL REVIEW: Transatlantic fictions of 9/11 and the War on Terror: images of insecurity, narratives of captivity by Susana Araújo, Bloomsbury Academic, 2015
Araújo (comparative studies, Univ. of Lisbon, Portugal) examines novels that reveal/critique popular notions of security and terror—Amy Waldman’s The Submission (2011), Frédéric Beigbeder’s Windows on the World (Eng tr., 2004), Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), Michael Cunningham’s Specimen Days (2005), Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland (2008), Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist (2007), Ricardo Menéndez Salmón’s El corrector (Spanish, 2009), José Saramago’s Seeing (Eng. tr., 2006), Salman Rushdie’s Shalimar the Clown (2005), and J. M. Coetzee’s Diary of a Bad Year (2008). Araújo places 9/11 novels in a continuum of European and American captivity narratives born of perceived or actual threats to personal safety, cultural identity, and national security. Especially compelling is her assertion that Western captivity narratives invert the roles of captor and captive by configuring the Western subject as captive to amorphous sources of terror. As she points out, this configuration does not account for the realities of Guantánamo Bay or Abu Ghraib, or for the continuing legacies of American and European imperialism. Finally, Araújo suggests that the figure of the white Western captive is yet another fiction among many that serve as “staples of the Western imagination.” This erudite, accessible study provides a vital perspective on a complex nexus of transnational issues, ideologies, and fictions. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates through faculty.
--J. D. Harding, Saint Leo University
US LIBRARY CHOICE
