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WORK TITLE: Oriana Fallaci
WORK NOTES: trans by Marina Harss
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE:
WEBSITE: http://www.cristinadestefano.com/en/
CITY: Paris
STATE:
COUNTRY: France
NATIONALITY: Italian
http://www.latimes.com/books/jacketcopy/la-ca-jc-oriana-fallaci-20171020-story.html
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born 1967, in Pavia, Italy; married; husband’s name Claudio; children: Lia, Marco.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author and journalist. Coordinator, Grand Premio delle Lettrici di Elle, 2010–.
WRITINGS
Contributor to periodicals, including Elle repubblica.
SIDELIGHTS
Cristina de Stefano is an Italian journalist best known for her work with the magazine Elle repubblica. She also works as a book scout, identifying potential bestsellers for publishers. “I work with books, which has been my passion since I was very young,” de Stefano explained in an autobiographical statement found on her home page, the Cristina de Stefano Website: I write books, I review books and I evaluate books … to get them translated.”
De Stefano is also the author of biographies of prominent twentieth-century women, including Americane avventurose, a collection of short histories of famous American women like Dorothy Dandridge, Anne Sexton, and Amelia Earhart, and a longer work on the poet and translator Cristina Campo (Belinda e il mostro: vita segreta di Cristina Campo), and a biography of one of the most famous Italian journalists of the century: Oriana: una donna, translated into English as Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend.
Fallaci was one of the most renowned interviewers of the twentieth century, whose subjects ranged from Henry Kissinger to the Ayatollah Khomeini. “She was born in Florence, where her father was a cabinetmaker and part of the anti-fascist resistance during World War II,” recounted Dwight Garner in the New York Times. “As a young girl she became a courier for the resistance, smuggling hand grenades inside heads of lettuce. Her mother was intelligent but stunted; she was forced to cook and clean for her husband’s extended family. Fallaci said she became a journalist, then largely a man’s profession, in part to vindicate her mother. She first made her name with prickly social and celebrity reporting. In the mid-1950s she began working for Italian newspapers from Hollywood.” “Eventually she began traveling frequently to California, lounging poolside with more movie stars and filing more stories. She got herself assigned to cover NASA and the astronauts she adored,” wrote Nina Burleigh in the New York Times Book Review. “Fallaci then moved on to the subjects that made her famous: war and global politics.” “There is a wonderful irony here. Having cut her teeth interrogating the merely famous, she upgraded to the high, the mighty, the Shakespearean movers-and-shakers,” said James Marcus in the Los Angeles Times. “They were mostly men, and they were mostly intimidated by this wily, theatrical, fearless woman with a microphone. “To what degree does power fascinate you?” she asked Henry Kissinger. (The answer, predictably and unconvincingly, was not at all.) Talking with the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, she responded to a jeering comment about her respectability by ripping off her chador: ‘I’m going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now. There. Done.'”
Reviewers found de Stefano’s portrait of Fallaci fascinating. “Fallaci was a piquant, stylish beauty, self-consciously photogenic in the Joan Didion way, a midcentury woman writer vigilant about her public image,” said Burleigh. “Fallaci lived a genuinely romantic life, too, with stormy loves and war wounds. But De Stefano, who had access to living friends, family members and colleagues as well as archives and letters, reveals another side to her life — long periods of self-imposed emotional and actual isolation to devote herself to writing, interspersed with anguished affairs.” “Always controversial and confrontational, a perfectionist who craved solitude and silence,” explained Donna Seaman in Booklist, “Fallaci is brought down only by love.” “Fallaci left an enormous body of work … and the future may demand a more definitive assessment of a long and productive career,” wrote a Kirkus Reviews contributor. But for now, this is a superb introduction.” “This,” said a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “is an intimate investigation into a larger-than-life personality who, in the end, was just another lonely soul.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Booklist, October 1, 2017, Donna Seaman, review of Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend, p. 5.
Kirkus Reviews, September 1, 2017, review of Oriana Fallaci.
Los Angeles Times, October 20, 2017, James Marcus, review of Oriana Fallaci.
New York Times, October 17, 2017, Dwight Garner, “The Life of a Guerrilla Journalist,” p. C4.
New York Times Book Review, November 3, 2017, Nina Burleigh, “Oriana Fallaci, Right or Wrong.”
Publishers Weekly, June 12, 2017, review of Oriana Fallaci, p. 51.
ONLINE
Cristina de Stefano Literary Scouting, http://destefanoliteraryscouting.com (April 11, 2018), author profile.
Cristina de Stefano Website, http://www.cristinadestefano.com (April 11, 2018), author profile.
Cristina De Stefano is a journalist and writer. She lives and works in Paris as a literary scout for many publishing houses in the world. Her books, Belinda e il mostro. Vita segreta di Cristina Campo (Adelphi 2002) and Americane avventurose (Adelphi 2007) have been translated in French, German, Spanish and Polish.
Cristina De Stefano
I am an Italian journalist and writer based in Paris. I run a literary scouting agency on French and Italian markets. I am married and mother of two children.
Journalist
Regular contributor to Italian Elle and Repubblica
Elle Repubblica
Writer
Belinda e il Mostro: vita segreta di Cristina Campo, Adelphi, 2002
Translated in French
Americane Avventurose, Adelphi, 2007
Translated in French, German, Spanish, Polish
Oriana. Una Donna, Rizzoli, 2013
Translated in French, German, Spanish, Polish, Finnish, Dutch, Chinese, English
I was born and grew up in Pavia, I have been living in Paris for more than ten years.
I am married to Claudio, whom I met when I was in high school. I have a daughter Lia and a son Marco, they are grown up now and are both students. I also have a cat, Strip: she likes to sleep next to my desk when I work.
I work with books, which has been my passion since I was very young: I write books, I review books and I evaluate books in order to get them translated.
Discover more: Writer, Journalist, Scouting
I started working with Elle when I was still a young student fresh from my university degree, and I never changed magazine.
From the beginning I had been in charge of the Book Section, which advises the reader on which books to read, and the Story of Women section, which contains biographical articles on famous women with exciting lives.
From 2010 I am in charge of the coordination of the Grand Premio delle Lettrici di Elle, which is based on an anonymous jury and is a very innovative initiative.
I have been working for ten year as a literary scout on the French and Italian markets. It is not a well-known activity, it's almost like being a secret agent of books. My role is to advise editors of several countries around the world on which books to buy and translate.
It's an underground war to obtain the bestsellers before everyone else. I won and lost, like it's supposed to be. My biggest victory must be immediately acknowledging the potential of La Verité sur L'Affaire Harry Quebert (The truth on the Harry Quebert case) written by Joel Dicker. The book is now climbing the charts.
Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend
Donna Seaman
Booklist. 114.3 (Oct. 1, 2017): p5.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 American Library Association
http://www.ala.org/aboutala/offices/publishing/booklist/
Full Text:
* Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend. By Cristina De Stefano. Tr. by Marina Harss. Oct. 2017. 288p. illus. Other, $25.95 (9781590517864). 070.92.
Born in Florence to poor, book-loving, heroically anti-Fascist parents, Fallaci joined the Resistance at age 14, delivering weapons on her bicycle. She supported her premed studies by writing for newspapers and soon dropped out to devote herself to journalism. In the first biography of this influential yet actually little known correspondent, De Stefano, herself a tireless researcher and mesmerizing writer, vividly describes Fallaci as fearless, tenacious, and exceptionally talented. In Rome, Fallaci covered the Italian cinema, then took on Hollywood. Unfazed by celebrities, she honed her now legendary interview technique, preparing assiduously, firing off "impertinent" questions, and including herself in her powerfully written, confiding articles. Once Fallaci turned her voracious attention to war and politics, she incessandy circled the globe, courageously reporting from war-torn Lebanon and Vietnam, and being injured by shrapnel in Mexico City. She interrogated world leaders, including Khomeini, Gaddafi, Kissinger, and Meir. But Fallaci also wrote poetic, psychologically revealing novels. "Stories pour out of her with the potency of fruit and flowers," writes De Stefano. Always controversial and confrontational, a perfectionist who craved solitude and silence, Fallaci is brought down only by love and the anguish of her miscarriages. In this meticulous, perceptive, and dramatic portrait, De Stefano reveals the full intensity and sensitivity of a trailblazing warrior writer.--Donna Seaman
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Seaman, Donna. "Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend." Booklist, 1 Oct. 2017, p. 5. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A510653647/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=f82f9d27. Accessed 16 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A510653647
De Stefano, Cristina: ORIANA FALLACI
Kirkus Reviews. (Sept. 1, 2017):
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
De Stefano, Cristina ORIANA FALLACI Other Press (Adult Nonfiction) $25.95 10, 17 ISBN: 978-1-59051-786-4
The great Italian writer gets her due in this short but captivating biography.Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006) played a unique role in international journalism in the latter half of the 20th century. She wrote, talked, and smoked furiously, and she wasn't afraid to get in the face of the rich and the powerful. She grilled Secretary of State Henry Kissinger about Vietnam, eliciting a quote describing himself as a lone cowboy that he regretted forever. Fallaci didn't suffer despots gladly; she called Haitian dictator Jean-Claude Duvalier an idiot to his face, and she defied the Ayatollah Khomeini by removing her head covering right in front of him. In her first book in English, Italian author and journalist De Stefano captures the sheer intensity of Fallaci's personality, both personally and professionally, and where it came from. She grew up working for the Italian resistance and matured into a woman who judged everyone, including herself, by the quality of courage. She was unforgiving of slights in friends and especially lovers; once it was over, there was no going back. She wasn't bogged down by inconsistencies; she was an ardent feminist who had mixed feelings about abortion and could become completely subservient to the men in her life. She hated authoritarianism but despised puritanical leftism. She was an unswerving atheist who admired and befriended Pope Benedict. After 9/11, Fallaci alienated liberals by becoming an unswerving Islamophobe. "The need to oppose fascism, of any type, on the Left or on the Right, is her line in the sand, the measuring stick with which she judges people and governments," writes the author. Although favorably inclined toward her subject, the book is not a hagiography; De Stefano diligently attempts to reveal all sides of a complex and brilliant figure. Fallaci left an enormous body of work, both journalism and fiction, and the future may demand a more definitive assessment of a long and productive career. But for now, this is a superb introduction to the life of an irreplaceable figure.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"De Stefano, Cristina: ORIANA FALLACI." Kirkus Reviews, 1 Sept. 2017. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A502192021/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=3a55f5be. Accessed 16 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A502192021
Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend
Publishers Weekly. 264.24 (June 12, 2017): p51.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend
Cristina de Stefano, trans, from the Italian by Marina Harss. Other, $25.95 (288p) ISBN 9781-59051-786-4
Italian journalist de Stefano peels away the layers of mystery surrounding journalist Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006), whose career broke boundaries for women in her field. The book notes how as a child Fallaci was haunted by I the specter of a discontented mother, who longed for a life beyond motherhood, and goes on to trace Fallaci's improbable rise from a childhood in Mussolini's Italy to her career as a journalist, agitator, and novelist. De Stefano goes behind the scenes of her high-profile interviews with figures such as Muammar Gaddafi, Indira Gandhi, Henry Kissinger, and Pope Benedict XVI. Never having met her subject, de Stefano reached out to Fallaci's friends and colleagues for interviews but encountered reticence and sometimes belligerence, and often received contradictory accounts from those who agreed to cooperate. Yet her subject inspired her to stay the course and keep digging. She applied the same dogged tenacity to this biography that defined Fallaci's work, and in the end de Stefano gained access to a large swathe of archival material, family records, and previously unpublished personal testimonies. Written in the present tense, the book allows readers to get to know Fallaci as she progresses in her career rather than in the context of the notoriety she garnered in her later years. This is an intimate investigation into a larger-than-life personality who, in the end, was just another lonely soul. (Oct.)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend." Publishers Weekly, 12 June 2017, p. 51. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A495720695/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=89070fd4. Accessed 16 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A495720695
The Life of a Guerrilla Journalist
Dwight Garner
The New York Times. (Oct. 17, 2017): Arts and Entertainment: pC4(L).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2017 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com
Full Text:
The Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci (1929-2006) wrote all sorts of things during her long career: novels, polemics, war dispatches, truth-dealing celebrity profiles.
But her Christiane Amanpour meets Joan Didion reputation rests on her confrontational interviews, mostly with political figures, which were repackaged in best-selling books in the 1970s and 80s. Fallaci's questions could resemble rectal probes.
She began an interview with the actress Gina Lollobrigida by stating, ''I don't think you're as stupid as people say.'' With Muammar el-Qaddafi in Libya, she asked: ''Do you know you are so unloved and unliked?''
Her interviews were guerrilla achievements and global events. She was witty, well-prepared, antagonistic; she got people to say things they ordinarily would not.
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger regretted his 1972 interview with Fallaci after he referred to himself in it as a ''cowboy who leads the wagon train by riding ahead alone on his horse.'' This displeased President Richard Nixon and prompted what passed at the time for a sizable scandal.
Interviewing Ayatollah Khomeini in Iran in 1979, Fallaci wore a chador. When she criticized the condition of women in Iran, Khomeini said, ''If you do not like Islamic dress you are not obliged to follow it. The chador is only for young and respectable women.''
Fallaci tore it from her head, saying, ''That's very kind of you, Imam. And since you said so, I'm going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now.''
Fallaci was sometimes criticized for being a poseur and a narcissist. But there was no one like her and there still isn't.
Fallaci is the subject of a short new biography, ''Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend,'' by the journalist Cristina De Stefano. Written in Italian, it has been translated into English by Marina Harss.
It's the first authorized biography we have of Fallaci, with access to new personal records, and welcome for that reason. It is not particularly well-written or thoughtful but it gets her story onto the page and, thanks to its subject, is never dull.
Fallaci was tiny (five feet one, 92 pounds) but had an explosive personality. She was called La Fallaci. She did not take well to editing. She did not suffer fools.
She was born in Florence, where her father was a cabinetmaker and part of the anti-fascist resistance during World War II. As a young girl she became a courier for the resistance, smuggling hand grenades inside heads of lettuce.
Her mother was intelligent but stunted; she was forced to cook and clean for her husband's extended family. Fallaci said she became a journalist, then largely a man's profession, in part to vindicate her mother.
She first made her name with prickly social and celebrity reporting. In the mid-1950s she began working for Italian newspapers from Hollywood. Her profiles were cutting, but she was popular out there. Her friends included Ingrid Bergman and Sean Connery. She went on a long road trip with Shirley MacLaine.
In 1963 and 1964 she spent extended periods at NASA. She wrote two books about the space program. She charmed the astronauts, drinking and dancing with them. On the second trip to the moon, astronaut Charles Conrad carried with him a photo of Oriana as a baby.
Fallaci rarely made things easy on herself. A Ford Foundation grant for her writing about NASA was withdrawn because she would not provide an itinerary. ''I may find myself in Saint Louis and decide, on the spur of the moment,'' she wrote the foundation, ''to take a quick trip to Mexico City to buy a sombrero.''
She was messy. She loved airplanes but was afraid of elevators. She smoked nearly three packs of cigarettes a day and had bad teeth. She opened her mail months late if at all. She was a hypochondriac. She put sticky notes on her apartment doorbell that said ''Go Away.''
She never married but had several long love affairs. When she fell in love, it was as if from a cliff. She was given to composing yards of bad poetry (''I miss you like I miss the rain'') which De Stefano quotes at cruel and numbing length.
Fallaci liked to say that she had a degree in solitude from the Sorbonne. She needed to be alone to get her work done.
''I have trouble writing when someone is hanging around,'' she wrote. ''Men know how to isolate themselves to write because their wives don't dare disturb them. But it's different for women because men are always interrupting them, asking for a kiss or a cup of coffee.''
Fallaci split the final decades of her life between Tuscany and New York City. She knew her career was coming to an end when, in the 1990s, it became increasingly difficult to get her Olivetti typewriter repaired.
In 1991 she learned she had a tumor in her breast. After it was removed she asked to see it. ''You goddamned bastard, don't even think about coming back,'' she told the tumor. ''Did you leave offspring inside of me? I'll kill you! You won't defeat me!''
She was in Manhattan on September 11, 2001. She had long been a critic of Islam and the attacks reignited her loathing. She published three late, controversial books about Islam and the West, beginning with ''The Rage and the Pride'' (2002).
She wrote in one of them that the ''sons of Allah breed like rats.'' The right increasingly embraced her; the left criticized her for inciting hatred.
Fallaci's books of interviews still pop off the page. They have the drama of prize fights; they are entrancing. She unhorsed her subjects. For our scrutiny, she brought them down to eye level.
Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the LegendBy Cristina De StefanoTranslated from the Italian by Marina Harss288 pp. Other Press. $25.95
CAPTION(S):
PHOTOS: Oriana Fallaci in 1968. (PHOTOGRAPH BY ASSOCIATED PRESS); Cristina De Stefano (PHOTOGRAPH BY FRANCESCO CASTALDO)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Garner, Dwight. "The Life of a Guerrilla Journalist." New York Times, 17 Oct. 2017, p. C4(L). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A509854585/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=ef878d97. Accessed 16 Mar. 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A509854585
Oriana Fallaci, Right or Wrong
By NINA BURLEIGHNOV. 3, 2017
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Oriana Fallaci in an undated photo.
ORIANA FALLACI
The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend
By Cristina De Stefano
Translated by Marina Harss
Illustrated. 282 pp. Other Press. $25.95.
Someone should write an opera about her: La Fallaci, beautiful, extravagant, courageous survivor of war and tempestuous love affairs, speaker of truth to power. But for now, Cristina De Stefano’s new biography of the Italian journalistic superstar Oriana Fallaci — unabashed hagiography to counter the writer’s late-life reputational demise — must suffice.
Fallaci was born in 1929 to working-class parents and proved her dauntlessness as a tiny, pigtailed bike messenger for anti-Fascists in World War II Florence, when she was just 14. By her early 20s, she was in Rome covering Hollywood on the Tiber, honing her craft on fizzy stories about European royals and Italian movie goddesses. Eventually she began traveling frequently to California, lounging poolside with more movie stars and filing more stories. She got herself assigned to cover NASA and the astronauts she adored (one of whom, De Stefano speculates rather fancifully, fathered one of Fallaci’s pregnancies, which ended in a miscarriage).
Fallaci then moved on to the subjects that made her famous: war and global politics. Golda Meir, Henry Kissinger, Deng Xiaoping, Ariel Sharon and Ayatollah Khomeini were just a few of the world leaders and statesmen who submitted to her trademark hourslong interviews, enduring her provocative questions while sharing breaks with her ubiquitous cigarettes.
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Her interviews remain studies in speaking truth to power. Interviewing Ayatollah Khomeini, she famously called the chador a “stupid, medieval rag” and took it off, provoking the Ayatollah to leave the room. (It is a testament to her journalistic power that he came back the next day.) She badgered Ariel Sharon about the meaning of the word “terrorist” and accused him of having been one himself. She got Henry Kissinger to compare himself to a cowboy, alone “with his horse and nothing else.” Nixon, De Stefano writes, “was not at all pleased by the cowboy metaphor.”
Photo
Credit Sonny Figueroa/The New York Times
Despite — or perhaps because of — her fearsome reputation, during the zenith of her reporting career few world leaders turned her down. “I have instinct,” she said of her interview strategy. “I really listen to the people I interview. In a way, I’m kind of a witch.” But “many people criticized her style, finding it too provocative,” De Stefano concedes, and some accused her “without evidence” of making things up. “The essence of my answers in that interview was accurate,” Kissinger would say, damning her with faint praise.
Fallaci was a piquant, stylish beauty, self-consciously photogenic in the Joan Didion way, a midcentury woman writer vigilant about her public image. Fallaci lived a genuinely romantic life, too, with stormy loves and war wounds. But De Stefano, who had access to living friends, family members and colleagues as well as archives and letters, reveals another side to her life — long periods of self-imposed emotional and actual isolation to devote herself to writing, interspersed with anguished affairs.
The relationships she forged with lovers — fellow journalists, a Greek revolutionary — were never lasting, and they often ended with her never speaking of them again, casting them into “the Siberia of my emotions,” as she put it. Her first love led to a suicide attempt and time in a psych ward, leaving her with the pithy conviction that “falling in love is giving oneself over to another, hands tied.” Later she would say, “Living together with a man, the man one loves the most, the best of men, is an intolerable torment for a modern woman.” Men, she continued, “seek a mother in every woman, and especially the woman they marry or live with.”
Her last romance was the most improbable of all, with an Italian soldier almost three decades younger named Paolo Nespoli, whose dreams of becoming an astronaut she nurtured. After five years together, intuiting that he wanted to leave but couldn’t say it, she told him never to contact her again. In 2007, a year after her death and as he prepared to enter the International Space Station, Nespoli — who is currently orbiting Earth in the station again — publicly thanked her for being “the woman who made it possible to achieve this goal.”
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Even as an unmarried career woman without children, Fallaci lived a very Italian life, privately devoted to her extended family and especially her parents, rooted to the Tuscan farmhouse she bought for them, and known among family and friends for her skill in that most traditional of female crafts: embroidery.
Besides her provocative interviews, Fallaci is mostly remembered for “Letter to a Child Never Born,” her novel about a pregnant professional woman trying to choose between a career and a child. Fallaci was against abortion and became more stridently so in her later years, but De Stefano presents letters from Fallaci to her lover to suggest that the first of Fallaci’s several miscarriages may have been the result of a botched abortion.
To Fallaci, the craft of journalism demanded contrariness. “To me, being a journalist means being disobedient,” she wrote to one colleague. “And being disobedient means being in opposition. In order to be in opposition, you have to tell the truth. And the truth is always the opposite of what people say.”
Her tragic fate was to find herself late in life hauled to court by an Italian judge on defamation charges for a series of polemics against Islam she wrote after 9/11. Her final days were spent venting at Islam, and in death her name has become — fairly or not — consistently associated with Islamophobia.
De Stefano doesn’t excuse her subject’s intolerance, but she does put it in context. According to De Stefano, Fallaci started to form her opinion of Islam in 1960, while on a world tour to research the status of women. “These veiled women are the unhappiest women in the world,” she wrote of her experience in Pakistan. “The wearer gazes out at the sky and her fellow man like a prisoner peering through the bars of her prison. This prison reaches from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean, and includes Morocco, Algeria, Nigeria, Libya, Iraq, Iran, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Afghanistan, Pakistan and Indonesia. It is the immense reign of Islam.” Fallaci later told friends that the Pakistani dictator Ali Bhutto cried when he told her he had been forced to marry his wife, a 23-year-old woman, when he was 15, and that Palestinian fighters in Lebanon refused to let Fallaci into a bomb shelter during a shelling, directing her instead to “a shed that turned out to be an explosives depot.”
In her novel “Inshallah,” published in 1990 after a stint covering fighting in Lebanon, one of the characters predicts that the next war wouldn’t be between capitalists and communists but that future conflicts would be channeled through religion — “between those who eat pig meat and those who don’t, those who drink wine and those who don’t, those who mumble Pater Noster and those who whisper Allah rassullillah.”
In her 70s, holed up in her memorabilia-packed New York townhouse, she watched the twin towers fall on TV and then wrote and published screeds on Islam and immigrants in Europe, saying that Muslims “breed like rats.” Even Christopher Hitchens disavowed her. She died in Florence, unrepentantly combative and eccentric, within hearing distance of the ringing bells of the Duomo. Her stoicism in the face of cancer had led hospital workers to call her “the fakir,” an Arabic word for monk or ascetic — one who is self-sufficient and in need only of God.
Nina Burleigh is the national politics correspondent at Newsweek magazine and the author of five nonfiction books.
A new biography gets Oriana Fallaci the way people who knew her couldn't
By JAMES MARCUS
OCT 20, 2017 | 10:00 AM
A new biography gets Oriana Fallaci the way people who knew her couldn't
Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. (AP Photo)
The journalist, novelist and irascible force of nature known as Oriana Fallaci never wanted her life story to be written. "I have never authorized, nor will I ever authorize, a biography," she once told an enquiring academic. That didn't stop at least one contender, the American scholar Santo L. Aricò, who even managed to obtain his subject's cooperation for 1998's "Oriana Fallaci: The Woman and the Myth." Yet Fallaci maintained an iron grip on the project, constantly finessing what the dogged author called "her official image." Not exactly the recipe for a living likeness, let alone the sort of three-dimensional portraiture that was Fallaci's stock-in-trade as an interviewer.
In some ways, Cristina de Stefano has had an easier task with "Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend." Unlike Aricò, who conducted several interviews with his subject before her death from cancer in 2006, De Stefano never met Fallaci. Nor did she have to contend with Fallaci's obstructive behavior and truly fearsome temper. (Hearing Fallaci scream at somebody else on the telephone, as I did more than once while translating her novel "Inshallah," made me want to take three Advil and lie in a dark room.) The subject's absence turns out to be a kind of blessing, leaving the author a free hand to recount what is, by any measure, a fascinating and utterly sui generis life.
Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci.
Italian journalist Oriana Fallaci. (AP Photo)
Fallaci was born in Florence, in 1929, to an indomitable mother and a penniless, Proust-loving father, who made his living as a woodcarver. Disappointed that the first of his offspring was a girl, Edoardo Fallaci taught her to shoot, hunt and absorb physical pain without complaint. All of this would come in handy soon enough. In 1943, after the fall of Mussolini, the Germans occupied northern Italy. Edoardo joined the Partisans — and so did his 13-year-old daughter, who conveyed leaflets, messages and supplies on her bicycle. The experience shaped her personality and her politics alike. It marked her, she would later recount, just as the "Pentecost left its mark upon the apostles."
After the war, she gravitated toward journalism, with the encouragement of her Uncle Bruno, who worked at "La Nazione." A tiny teenager in flats, she was initially dismissed as "the kid" by her Florentine colleagues. But Fallaci was a tough, precocious talent. She worked her way up the ranks, and by the early '50s, she was writing for "L'Europeo," which sent her to Hollywood for a month in 1957.
Fallaci pictured with her uncle Bruno Fallaci and other colleagues from the magazine Epoca. From the book "Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend".
Fallaci pictured with her uncle Bruno Fallaci and other colleagues from the magazine Epoca. From the book "Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend". (Private Archive Peraz)
Fallaci's initial collision with America, where she would spend much of the second half of her life, was fortuitous in all sorts of ways. It exposed her to a wider world and taught her that celebrities were often hollow shells: Potemkin Village personalities. It also seemed to crystallize her peculiar mixture of vulnerability and high-decibel truculence. "She was fragile," recalled one companion, "but she used aggressiveness as a shield. She attacked first. As a result, Americans were often terrified of her."
And not only Americans. By the late '50s, she had begun to turn what Orson Welles called her "sharp, Tuscan eye" on the rest of the world. First, "L'Europeo" sent her on a proto-feminist tour of Turkey, Pakistan, India, Malaysia, Hong Kong and Japan. Always attuned to the paradoxes of progress, she wrote about her encounters with "Muslim women who no longer wear the veil and are respected and free, but also unhappy, just as we are in the West." She published this reportage as a book, "The Useless Sex," in 1961, and followed up the next year with "Penelope at War," a thinly fictionalized novel about her turbulent love life. But before she could be pigeonholed as an anatomist of the nascent gender wars, Fallaci changed tack and spent almost a year reporting on the U.S. space program. Then she headed for Vietnam.
Her entire life was a war on the party line, the politically expedient, the prefabricated opinion, and she never stopped fighting, at least not on the page.
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Fallaci was herself a celebrity by then, and perhaps that made her uneasy. Plunging into a combat zone took her back to the fundamentals she had absorbed in 1943 and reignited her contempt for hypocrisy, which made her wary of both the Americans and the Viet Cong. In her final dispatch from the conflict, written as the North Vietnamese marched into Saigon, she anticipated both the victory and its aftermath of Stalinist rule and reeducation camps: "The Communists are splendid while they fight, and intolerable once they have won."
While she continued to function as a war correspondent, Fallaci found another way to vent her rage at the abuse of power: the interview. There is a wonderful irony here. Having cut her teeth interrogating the merely famous, she upgraded to the high, the mighty, the Shakespearean movers-and-shakers. They were mostly men, and they were mostly intimidated by this wily, theatrical, fearless woman with a microphone. "To what degree does power fascinate you?" she asked Henry Kissinger. (The answer, predictably and unconvincingly, was not at all.) Talking with the Ayatollah Khomeini in 1979, she responded to a jeering comment about her respectability by ripping off her chador: "I'm going to take off this stupid, medieval rag right now. There. Done." (Khomeini fled the room at once.)
During Fallaci's famous interview with Khomeini in September of 1979, in which she removed her veil in protest. From the book "Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend".
During Fallaci's famous interview with Khomeini in September of 1979, in which she removed her veil in protest. From the book "Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend". (Private Archive Peraz)
Many of these interviews were collected in "Interview With History," which I suspect will outlast much of Fallaci's output. The conversations are sharp, informed, often entertaining: They are two-part inventions in which the interviewer is a major presence, a player. In that sense, they may have helped to shape our contemporary media landscape, with its preference for the shouting match or polemical dunk tank.
What followed was less inspiring. Fallaci spent almost a decade on "Inshallah," a giant novel about the war in Lebanon, which exposed her weakness for melodrama and metaphysical kitsch. She deserves some credit, as De Stefano argues, for predicting that "radical Islam [would] expand beyond the Middle Eastern arena and confront the West in a much wider war." But her disdain for the faith, fed initially by its oppression of women, got the better of her. The Muslim characters in "Inshallah" are queasy-making cartoons: killers, traitors, homosexuals (always a black mark in Fallaci's book). And a decade later, after the Sept. 11 attacks, she published a Muslim-hating polemic, "The Rage and the Pride," whose hyperventilating scorn made it, in the words of Christopher Hitchens, a "sort of primer in how not to write about Islam."
De Stefano, who has filled in some important biographical gaps, is less reliable as a critic of Fallaci's work. She seems not to recognize that these final productions, with their depressing quotient of egotism and Islamophobia, ended Fallaci's career on a low note. As it happens, they also made this lifelong anti-fascist into a hero of the right — an irony that may have tickled her, if she dwelled on it at all. But her entire life was a war on the party line, the politically expedient, the prefabricated opinion, and she never stopped fighting, at least not on the page. Blame it on Uncle Bruno, perhaps, who drilled his main journalistic precept into Fallaci's head as a child: "First of all, don't bore the reader!" Early and late, she almost never did.
Marcus is the editor of Harper's Magazine and the translator of seven books from the Italian, the most recent being Giacomo Casanova's "The Duel."
“Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend” by Cristina de Stefano, translated by Marina Harss.
“Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend” by Cristina de Stefano, translated by Marina Harss. (Other Press)
"Oriana Fallaci: The Journalist, the Agitator, the Legend"
Cristina de Stefano, translated by Marina Harss
Other Press: 288 pp., $25.95