Saturday,
June 03,
Oriana Fallaci- The Agitator- From "The New Yorker" -
June 2006
The
ANNOTICO Report
Oriana Fallaci, at seventy-seven (77) is
STILL SO Angry, and Outrageous, that as I read her
Tirades, I can't but Laugh aloud.
Example:"
Berlusconi and Prodi were “two fucking idiots,”
she said. “Why do the people humiliate themselves by voting? I didn’t
vote. No! Because I have dignity. . . If, at a certain
moment, I had closed my nose and voted for one , I
would spit on my own face.”
Outgoing
Italian President, Carlo Azeglio Ciampi,
had considered giving Fallaci the title of Senator for Life but lost his nerve. With evident
delight, she noted that Ciampi’s “wife
was infuriated at him” for the decision. “For some time, she didn’t
speak to him. “To me, in a sense, it was a relief,” Fallaci said. “I didn’t want to be Senator for
Life, and stay in
I
always admired Fallaci's crusade for the underdog,
and against corporate and oligarchic greed, but her poisonous attitude
toward Muslims in particular borders on the psychotic.
The
magnificently rebellious Oriana Fallaci
now cultivates, it seems, the prejudices of the petite bourgeoisie. She is
opposed to abortion, unless she “were raped and made pregnant by a bin
Laden or a Zarqawi.” She is fiercely opposed to
gay marriage (“In the same way that the Muslims would like us all to
become Muslims, they would like us all to become homosexuals”), and
suspicious of immigration in general. The demonstrations by immigrants in the
Edoardo
and Tosca, her father and mother, had inordinate courage (both physical and
moral) that they imparted to their 3 daughters, that all exhibited during
WWII.
For
two decades, from the mid-nineteen-sixties to the mid-nineteen-eighties, Fallaci was one of the sharpest political interviewers in
the world. She usually "skinned" her subjects, who were among the
world’s most powerful figures. She lulled Kissinger into a fatal blunder,
and made the stone face Khomeini laugh aloud at her impertinent behavior.
Federico Fellini called her to her face: “Nasty
liar. Rude little bitch.”
The
interview is long, but tight, entertaining and informative!!! Take
the time. It's worth it!!!
THE
AGITATOR
Oriana Fallaci directs her fury toward
Islam.
The
New Yorker
by Margaret Talbot
Issue
of 2006-06-05
“Yesterday,
I was hysterical,” the Italian journalist and novelist Oriana Fallaci said. She was telling
me a story about a local dog owner and the liberties he’d allowed his
animal to take in front of Fallaci’s town
house, on the
For two decades,
from the mid-nineteen-sixties to the mid-nineteen-eighties, Fallaci
was one of the sharpest political interviewers in the world. Her subjects were
among the world’s most powerful figures: Yasir
Arafat, Golda Meir, Indira
Gandhi, Haile Selassie, Deng Xiaoping. Henry Kissinger, who later wrote that his
1972 interview with her was “the single most disastrous conversation I
have ever had with any member of the press,” said that he had been
flattered into granting it by the company he’d be keeping as part of Fallaci’s “journalistic pantheon.” It was
more like a collection of pelts: Fallaci never left
her subjects unskinned.
Fallaci’s manner of interviewing
was deliberately unsettling: she approached each encounter with studied
aggressiveness, made frequent nods to European existentialism (she often
disarmed her subjects with bald questions about death, God, and pity), and
displayed a sinuous, crafty intelligence. It didn’t hurt that she was
petite and beautiful, with straight, smooth hair that she wore parted in the
middle or in pigtails; melancholy blue-gray eyes, set off by eyeliner; a
cigarette-cured voice; and an adorable Italian accent.
During the
Vietnam War, she was sometimes photographed in fatigues and a helmet; her
rucksack bore handwritten instructions to return her body to the Italian
Ambassador “if K.I.A.” In these images she looked as slight and
vulnerable as a child. When she was shot, in 1968, while reporting on the
student demonstrations in Mexico City, and then confined by the police with the
wounded and the dying on one floor of an apartment building, the first impulse
of the students around her was to protect her; one boy gave her his sweater, in
order to cover her face from the drip of a sewage pipe. Her
essential toughness never stopped taking people—men, especially—by
surprise.
Fallaci’s journalism, at first
conducted for the Italian magazine L’Europeo and later published in translation throughout the world,
was infused with a “mythic sense of political evil,” as the writer
Vivian Gornick once put it—an almost adolescent
aversion to power, which suited the temperament of the times. As Fallaci explained in her preface to “Interview with
History,” a 1976 collection of Q. & A.s, “Whether
it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous
general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon.
. . . I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only
way to use the miracle of having been born.”
In Fallaci’s interview with Kissinger, she told him that
he had become known as “Nixon’s mental wet nurse,” and lured
him into boasting that Americans admired him because he “always acted
alone”—like “the cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding
ahead alone on his horse, the cowboy who rides all alone into the town.”
Political cartoonists mercilessly lampooned this remark, and, according to
Kissinger’s memoirs, the quote soured his relations with Nixon.
(Kissinger claimed that she had taken his words out of context.) But the most
remarkable moment in the interview came when Fallaci
bluntly asked him, about
Fallaci’s interview with Khomeini,
which appeared in the Times on
Fallaci continued posing
indignant questions about the treatment of women in the new Islamic state. Why,
she asked, did Khomeini compel women to “hide themselves, all bundled up,”
when they had proved their equal stature by helping to bring about the Islamic
revolution? Khomeini replied that the women who “contributed to the
revolution were, and are, women with the Islamic dress”; they weren’t
women like Fallaci, who “go around all
uncovered, dragging behind them a tail of men.” A few minutes later, Fallaci asked a more insolent question: “How do you
swim in a chador?” Khomeini snapped, “Our customs are none of your
business. If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to wear it. Because Islamic dress is for good and proper young women.”
Fallaci saw an opening, and charged in. “That’s
very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I’m going to take off this
stupid, medieval rag right now.” She yanked off her chador.
In a recent
e-mail, Fallaci said of Khomeini, “At that
point, it was he who acted offended. He got up like a cat, as agile as a cat,
an agility I would never expect in a man as old as he was, and he left me. In
fact, I had to wait for twenty-four hours (or forty-eight?) to see him again
and conclude the interview.” When Khomeini let her return, his son Ahmed
gave Fallaci some advice: his father was still very
angry, so she’d better not even mention the word “chador.” Fallaci turned the tape recorder back on and immediately
revisited the subject. “First he looked at me in astonishment,” she
said. “Total astonishment. Then his lips moved
in a shadow of a smile. Then the shadow of a smile became a real smile. And
finally it became a laugh. He laughed, yes. And, when the interview was over,
Ahmed whispered to me, ‘Believe me, I never saw my father laugh. I think
you are the only person in this world who made him laugh.’ ”
Fallaci recalled that she found
Khomeini intelligent, and “the most handsome old man I had ever met in my
life. He resembled the ‘Moses’ sculpted by Michelangelo.”
And, she said, Khomeini was “not a puppet like Arafat or Qaddafi or the
many other dictators I met in the Islamic world. He was a sort of Pope, a sort
of king—a real leader. And it did not take long to realize that in spite
of his quiet appearance he represented the Robespierre or the Lenin of
something which would go very far and would poison the world. People loved him
too much. They saw in him another Prophet. Worse: a God.”
Upon leaving
Khomeini’s house after her first interview, Fallaci
was besieged by Iranians who wanted to touch her because she’d been in
the Ayatollah’s presence. “The sleeves of my shirt were all torn
off, my slacks, too,” she recalled. “My arms were full of bruises,
and hands, too. Do believe me: everything started with Khomeini. Without
Khomeini, we would not be where we are. What a pity that, when pregnant with
him, his mother did not choose to have an abortion
Today, Fallaci believes, the Western world is in danger of being
engulfed by radical Islam. Since
According to Fallaci, Europeans, particularly those on the political
left, subject people who criticize Muslim customs to a double standard. “If
you speak your mind on the
The rhetoric of Fallaci’s trilogy is intentionally intemperate and
frequently offensive: in the first volume, she writes that Muslims “breed
like rats”; in the second, she writes that this statement was “a
little brutal” but “indisputably accurate.” She ascribes
behavior to bloodlines—
These books have
brought Fallaci, who will turn seventy-seven later
this month, and who has had cancer for more than a decade, to a strange place
in her life. Much of the Italian intelligentsia now shuns her. (The German
press has been highly critical, too.) A 2003 article in the left-wing newspaper
La Repubblica called her “ignorantissima,” an “exhibitionist
posing as the Joan of Arc of the West.” A fashionable gallery in
Fallaci has repeatedly fallen
afoul of some of
Yet Fallaci’s recent books, and the specious trial that
she is facing as a result—her books may offend, but it is no less
offensive to prosecute her for them—have also made her a beloved figure
to many Europeans. The books have been best-sellers in
Fallaci’s arguments appeal to many
Europeans on a visceral level. The murder of the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh,
the “honor killings” of young women in England and Sweden, and the
controversy in France over whether girls may wear head scarves to school have
underscored the enormous clash in values between secular Europeans and
fundamentalist Muslim immigrants. In
Some European
intellectuals have given Fallaci credit for offering
an enraged, articulate voice to people who are genuinely bewildered and
dismayed by the challenges of assimilating Islamic immigrants. In 2002, writing
in the Italian weekly Panorama, Lucia Annunziata, a former foreign correspondent and columnist,
and Carlo Rossella, then the magazine’s editor,
argued that “The Rage and the Pride” had “redefined
Oriana Fallaci
has confronted the issue with ironclad simplicity: We are different, she has
said. And, at this point, we are incompatible.” The French philosopher
Alain Finkielkraut, writing in Le
Point, said that Fallaci “went too far,”
reducing all “Sons of Allah to their worst elements,” yet he
commended her for taking “the discourse and the actions of our
adversaries” at their word and—in the wake of September 11th, the
execution of Daniel Pearl, the destruction of Buddhas
in Afghanistan, and other atrocities committed in the name of Islam—not
being intimidated by the “penitential narcissism that makes the West
guilty of even that which victimizes it.”
Last year, a
support committee for Fallaci collected some letters
that it had received from people across
Fallaci owns an apartment in
“Darling,”
she growled over the phone the first time we spoke, “as you well know, I
never give interviews.” Strictly speaking, this
isn’t true. Over the years, she’s given many of them, sometimes
with embarrassing results—in Scheer’s
1981 Playboy interview, she complained about
homosexuals who “swagger and strut and wag their tails” and “fat”
women reporters who didn’t like her. When I visited her on a rainy
Saturday afternoon in April, and again the next day, I found her voluble and
dramatic, capable of leaping to her feet to illustrate a point, and shouting
when she felt the point warranted it—which was often. She smoked little
brown Nat Sherman cigarettes; smoking, she believes, “disinfects”
her.
Fallaci’s
We sat down next
to a table piled with newspaper clippings from
On the day I
visited, Fallaci was dressed like a refined European
lady: tweed skirt, leaf-green sweater, handsome antique jewelry, suиde pumps. She wore her hair tied neatly at the
nape of her neck rather than long and loose, as she used to, but she still
looked beautiful—she has a perfect oval face and robust cheekbones. She
put on a pair of jewel-rimmed reading glasses as she brandished another
clipping, and said with satisfaction, “Ah, this
is the scandal!” The conservative newspaper Libero had campaigned, unsuccessfully, for Fallaci to be made a Senator for Life, an honor conferred
by the Italian President. According to the paper, the outgoing President, Carlo
Azeglio Ciampi, had
considered giving Fallaci the title, but lost his
nerve. “To me, in a sense, it was a relief,” Fallaci
said. “I didn’t want to be Senator for Life, and stay in
I visited Fallaci on the day before the Italian election, in which
Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was defeated by the
center-left candidate, Romano Prodi. Fallaci told me that she had not sent in an absentee
ballot. She loved referenda: “Do you want the hunter to go hunting under
your window? No! Do you want the Koran in your schools? No!” “No”
was something Fallaci was happy to say. But
Berlusconi and Prodi were “two fucking idiots,”
she said. “Why do the people humiliate themselves by voting? I didn’t
vote. No! Because I have dignity. . . . If, at a
certain moment, I had closed my nose and voted for one of them, I would spit on
my own face.”
Many of the
clippings on Fallaci’s table focussed on Adel Smith’s lawsuit against her. She
said that she would not attend the trial, which is scheduled for later this
month. Although she is no longer at risk of incarceration, she invoked the
possibility. “Because, you know, I am a danger to myself if I get angry,”
she said. “If they were thinking to give me three years in jail, I will
say or do something for which they give me nine
years! I am capable of everything if I get angry.”
I’d
always thought of Fallaci as an icon of the
nineteen-sixties—one of those women who had lived an emancipated life
without ever calling herself a feminist, an insouciant heroine out of “The
Golden Notebook” or “Bonjour Tristesse.”
She denigrated marriage, got thrown out of nice restaurants for wearing slacks,
and hung out with Anna Magnani and Ingrid Bergman.
Her autobiographical novel “Letter to a Child Never Born” (1975)
was a free woman’s despairing confession of ambivalence about bearing a
child. “A Man” (1979) was a fictional tribute to her great love,
the Greek resistance fighter Alexandros Panagoulis, who died in a suspicious automobile accident in
Athens three years after they met. Panagoulis had
been imprisoned, and endured torture, for his failed
attempt on the life of the Greek junta leader George Papadopoulos, in 1968. “I
didn’t want to kill a man,” he told Fallaci
in an interview. “I’m not capable of killing a man. I wanted to
kill a tyrant.”! As a political prisoner, Panagoulis
was defiant toward his captors and wrote poetry in his own blood; Fallaci considered him a model of what it is to be a man. I
thought of her as a product of that heady time when big and bloody political
matters were still at stake in Europe (dictators ruled Spain, Portugal, and
Greece), but small, sophisticated cultural rebellions (movies, hair styles,
poetic manifestos) made life chic and interesting. There’s some truth to
this image, but Fallaci’s sensibility is a
product less of the sixties than of the forties, and the struggle against
Fascism in the Second World War.
Fallaci was born in Florence in
1929, to a family with a long history of rebellion. Her mother, Tosca, she
said, was the orphaned daughter of an anarchist—“and I tell you those
were people with balls! With balls! And they were the first ones to be
executed.” On both sides of her family, she said, she had relatives who
fought for the Risorgimento—“people who were always in jail.”
Fallaci was an avid reader as a child (her parents
lived modestly but splurged on books), and a favorite author was Jack London.
His tales of brave acts in the face of savage nature inspired her to become a
writer. She describes her father, Edoardo—a craftsman who became a leader
in the anti-Fascist movement in Tuscany, and who served time in prison for it—as
a sweet man. “Heroes can be sweet,” she said, adding that Panagoulis had been that way, too.
But both of Fallaci’s parents prized courage and toughness in
their three daughters. In “The Rage and the Pride,” she tells a
story about the Allied bombardment of Florence on September 25, 1943. She and
her family took refuge in a church as the bombs began to fall. The walls were
shaking—the priest cried out, “Help us, Jesus!”—and Oriana, who was the eldest, at fourteen, began to cry. “In
a silent, composed way, mind you,” she writes. “No moans, no
hiccups. But Father noticed it all the same, and, in order to help me, to calm
me down, poor Father, he did the wrong thing. He gave me a powerful slap—he
stared me in the eyes and said, ‘A girl does not, must not, cry.’ ”
Fallaci says that she’s never cried since—not
even when Panagoulis died.
As a teen-ager, Fallaci did clandestine work for the anti-Fascist
underground—she had her own nom de guerre, Emilia,
and she carried explosives and delivered messages. After Italy surrendered, in
September, 1943, and American and British prisoners began escaping from prison
camps, one of her tasks was to accompany them “past the lines” and
to safe refuge. Fallaci was chosen because she wore
her hair in pigtails and looked deceptively innocent. “It was so scary,
because there were minefields, and you never knew where the mines were,”
she recalled. “When my mother read that in a book later, she said, to my
father, ‘You would have sacrificed newly born children! You and your ideas.’ And then she said, ‘Well,
but I had a feeling you were doing something like that.’ ”
Fallaci’s parents looked upon the
Americans as their particular friends, and when she was in high school they
insisted that she learn English when her classmates were studying French. It
was the beginning of a lifelong affinity for America, even when, as during the
Vietnam War, she was sharply critical of its policies. “In my old age, I
have been thinking about this, and I have reached the conclusion that those who
have physical courage also have moral courage,” she said. “Physical
courage is a great test.” She added, “I know I have courage. But I’m
not alone. My sister Neera was like me. And my second sister, Paola, too. It came from the education
my parents gave us.”
She proudly told
a story about her mother, which, like other recollections, sounded as if it might have been polished over time. “When my father
was arrested, we didn’t know where they had him, so she went everywhere
for two days and finally she found him, at the house of torture. It was called
Villa Triste. They killed people there. And the
Fascist major was named Mario Caritа—Major
Charity. Mother—I don’t know how she did it—she went to the
office of Major Charity, passing a room that was full of blood on the floor,
the blood of three men who had been arrested and tied together, and one of them
was my father. Caritа says, ‘Madam. I
have no time to lose. Your husband will be executed tomorrow morning at six.
You can dress in black.’ My mother got up—and I always imagine the
scene this way, as if she were the Statue of Liberty—and
my mother said, ‘Mario Caritа, tomorrow
morning I shall dress in black, like you said. But if you are born from the
womb of a woman, ask your mot! her to do the same,
because your day will come very soon.’ You could think for a year before
you came up with something like that—to her, it came.”
Her mother was
pregnant at the time, Fallaci went on. “She
mounted on her bicycle, and all at once she had pains so terrible. She entered
into a beautiful building and, in the atrium, she lost the child. She put it
in, I don’t know, a handkerchief or something. She mounted the bicycle
again. She rode home. I opened the door, and there was mother, as pale as snow.
And before she entered she said, ‘Father will be executed tomorrow
morning at six, and Elena’—that was the name she had given the baby—‘is
dead.’ No tears.” In the end, Edoardo Fallaci was spared, though he spent additional time in jail.
Fallaci’s sister Neera
became a writer, and died of cancer; Paola is a perfectionist gardener—imagine
a cross between Martha Stewart and Oriana—who
raises prize-quality chickens on Fallaci’s
property in rural Tuscany.
Fallaci sees the threat of
Islamic fundamentalism as a revival of the Fascism that she and her sisters
grew up fighting. She told me, “I am convinced that the situation is
politically substantially the same as in 1938, with the pact in Munich, when
England and France did not understand a thing. With the Muslims, we have done
the same thing.” She elaborated, in an e-mail, “Look at the
Muslims: in Europe they go on with their chadors and their burkas
and their djellabahs. They go on with the habits
preached by the Koran, they go on with mistreating
their wives and daughters. They refuse our culture, in short, and try to impose
their culture, or so-called culture, on us. . . . I reject them, and this is
not only my duty toward my culture. Toward my values, my principles, my
civilization. It is not only my duty toward my Christian roots. It is my duty
toward freedom and toward the freedom fighter I am since I was a little girl
fighting as a partisan against Nazi-Fascism. Islami! sm is the new Nazi-Fascism. With
Nazi-Fascism, no compromise is possible. No
hypocritical tolerance. And those who do not understand this simple reality are
feeding the suicide of the West.”
Fallaci refuses to recognize the
limitations of this metaphor—say, the fact that Muslim immigration is not
the same as an annexation by another state. And although European countries
should indeed refuse to countenance certain cultural practices—polygamy, “honor
killings,” and anti-Semitic teachings, for example—Fallaci tends to portray the worst practices of Islamic
fundamentalists as representative of all Muslims. Certainly, European countries
have made some foolish compromises in the name of placating Muslim residents.
In Germany, where courts have ordered that Muslim religious instruction be
offered in schools, just as Christian instruction is, critics have complained
that the Islamic teaching often perpetuates a conservative version of Islam.
The result, the historian Bernard Lewis argued, in a recent talk in Washington,
is that “Islam as taught in Turkish schools is a sort of modernized,
semi-secularized version of Islam, and Islam as taught in German schools is the
f! ull Wahhabi
blast.” (This is a good reminder of why the American model of keeping
religious instruction out of public schools facilitates assimilation.) Many of Fallaci’s objections, however, have more to do with
her aesthetic sensibilities. For her, hearing Muslim prayers in Tuscany—she
does her own wailing imitation—is a form of oppression. Yet such examples
do not rise to the level of argument that she wants to make, which is that the
native culture of Italy will collapse if Muslims keep immigrating.
“They live
at our expense, because they’ve got schools, hospitals, everything,”
she said at one point, beginning to shout. “And they want to build damn
mosques everywhere.” She spoke of a new mosque and Islamic center planned
for Colle di Val d’Elsa,
near Siena. She vowed that it would not remain standing. “If I’m
alive, I will go to my friends in
The
magnificently rebellious Oriana Fallaci
now cultivates, it seems, the prejudices of the petite bourgeoisie. She is
opposed to abortion, unless she “were raped and made pregnant by a bin
Laden or a Zarqawi.” She is fiercely opposed to
gay marriage (“In the same way that the Muslims would like us all to
become Muslims, they would like us all to become homosexuals”), and
suspicious of immigration in general. The demonstrations by immigrants in the
United States these past few months “disgust” her, especially when
protesters displayed the Mexican flag. “I don’t love the Mexicans,”
Fallaci said, invoking her nasty treatment at the
hands of Mexican police in 1968. “If you hold a gun and say, ‘Choose
who is worse between the Muslims and the Mexicans,’ I have a moment of
hesitation. Then I choose the Muslims, because they have broken my balls.”
In “The
Rage and the Pride,” Fallaci portrays the
attacks of September 11th as a thunderclap that woke her from a quiet,
novel-writing existence and transformed her, almost unwillingly, into an
anti-Islamic rebel. But Fallaci’s distaste for
Islam goes way back. Reasonable worries about the rise of Muslim fundamentalism
were combined with a visceral revulsion and the need for a new enemy, in the
post-Fascist, post-Communist world. Her interviews with Yasir
Arafat (whom she loathed), Qaddafi (whom she also loathed), and even Muhammad
Ali (whom she walked out on, she says, after he belched in her face) all
fuelled her antipathy toward the Muslim world. So did her
experiences in
I started
wondering if Fallaci would tolerate any Muslim immigration, or any mosque in
She wrote that
she found my question about whether she would tolerate any mosques in
My
second meeting with Fallaci was a less inflammatory
encounter. She is an excellent cook, and she made us lunch—cotechino sausage, polenta,
mashed potatoes, and delicious little tarts with pine nuts and dried fruit—and
served champagne. I’d never seen anyone approach certain kitchen tasks
with such ferocity. “I must CRUSH the
potatoes,” she declared. At one point, we spoke about populist leaders in
Fallaci was wearing a sweater and
a skirt again that day. Late in life, she realized that skirts are more
comfortable than the pants she had favored as a young woman. Besides, she wore
pants when other women didn’t because she was “a person who had
always gone against the current,” certainly since she started her writing
career, at age sixteen, as a beat reporter for a Florentine newspaper. Now that
everybody wore pants, what was the point? She had some evening dresses
upstairs, relics from a brief period in her early thirties when she’d
been a little less serious. But now they felt to her “like monuments”;
where would she wear them? We talked about the historical novel that she had
set aside after September 11th, when “this Islam business kidnapped me,”
her regrets that she’s never had children, and her long illness. One of
her doctors, she said, had asked her recently, “Why are you still alive?”
Fallaci responded, “Dottore,
don’t do that to me. S! omeday
I break your head.” She added, “Another day, I smiled and said, ‘You
tell me—you are the doctor.’ See, I got
offended. ‘I don’t want to come here to hear about my death. Your
duty is to speak to me about life, to keep me alive.’ ”
She surprised me
with a charming story about being a young writer in
After I had
interviewed Fallaci, I discovered two great examples
of her journalism that I had not read before. In a witty 1963 article about
Federico Fellini, Fallaci
describes with wary, nervy thoroughness the many times and places that the
great director kept her waiting. When she finally corners him, she begins by
saying, “So then let us brace ourselves, Signor Fellini,
and let us discuss Federico Fellini, just for a
change. I know you find it hard: you are so withdrawing, so secretive, so modest. But it is our duty to discuss him, for the sake
of the nation.” She goes on in this vein until Fellini
cuts her off, saying, “Nasty liar. Rude little
bitch.” In her introduction to the interview, she writes, “I used
to be truly fond of Federico Fellini. Since our
tragic encounter, I’m a lot less fond. To be exact, I’m no longer
fond of him. That is, I don’t like him at all. Glory is a heavy burden, a
murdering poison, and to bear it is an art. And to have that art is rare.”
Equally
absorbing, in a different way, was the section of her 1969 book, “Nothing,
and So Be It,” in which she describes the events of October, 1968, in
These pieces
showed Fallaci in her prime. In her e-mail, however,
she told me that she didn’t really remember the interview with Fellini—only that she didn’t like him. And her
memories of
Not that it would
matter to her. “You’ve got to get old, because you have nothing to
lose,” she said over lunch that afternoon. “You have this
respectability that is given to you, more or less. But you don’t give a
damn. It is the ne plus ultra of freedom. And things
that I didn’t used to say before—you know, there is in each of us a
form of timidity, of cautiousness—now I open my big mouth. I say, ‘What
are you going to do to me? You go fuck yourself—I say what I want.’
”
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