Word: fallaciousness
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Fallaci's intention to involve the reader emotionally in Alekos' experience; A Man is not a human drama but a lesson--a lesson that torture is a reality; a lesson that individuals who will not surrender to society will by destroyed by it; a lesson that evil corrodes the left as well as the right; a lesson that freedom is a dream. Fallaci has addressed these in the past, raising them as issues during her interviews, but here she illustrates them in grisly detail: the knitting needles up the urethra, the backstabbing by old friends, and the corruption at every...
...after an unsuccessful assassination attempt on the dictator, and they shuttle him from torture center to torture center until they reach his place of captivity, a cell only large enough for two steps in one direction. When he is released, he meets the narrator, a character clearly based on Fallaci herself, an international political reporter who has covered revolutionaries from Bolivia to Vietnam. While imprisoned, Alekos had spent hours teaching himself Italian (he went on hunger strikes to obtain the books) so he could translate her works into Greek (more hunger strikes to obtain these as well...
Their meeting changes the tone of Fallaci's writing--for several chapters she loses her cynical tone and conveys the terror and attraction this man raises in her. "It would be disastrous to accept your love and love you: I knew that with certainty, in an instant," she says after she first meets Alekos. But loving him was inevitable "because it overpowered the instinct of survival and the ambiguous snare of happiness...
...FALLACI'S INSIGHT in these more dramatic moments of epiphany and change speak far more eloquently of Alekos as a compelling, compelled man. We remember these passages, not his beatings, when he marches arm-in-arm with his former torturers, when he attempts, once again, to assassinate the Greek ruler, and when he sets himself up for his own murder by publishing classified government documents. These brilliantly written digressions enlarge Alekos' character from the single-minded revolutionary to more human dimensions, and his story evokes frustration and anger. But these passages are over-shadowed by pages and pages of electric...
...Alekos die? Because he had to. Why are governments so evil? Because all men are evil. And Alekos? He was the exception. This is Fallaci's point--that the exception cannot exist for long. He embarasses us, he scorns us, and he cannot touch...