Word: fallaciousness
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...Oriana Fallaci...
Fifty years ago, Critic D.B. Wyndham Lewis compiled an anthology of hilariously (and unintentionally) bad verse entitled The Stuffed Owl. Today an enterprising editor could produce a companion Owl stuffed with bad prose. High on the list should be selections from Oriana Fallaci's nonfiction novel A Man. The title is the last instance of unmannered writing to be encountered until the reader emerges at the other end, covered with tropes...
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...