“The meeting of two solitudes is also the meeting of two imaginations and our fantasy is to fill every silence, every void.”
What is A Man? A biography, an ideological novel, a journalistic investigation and a historical-political essay. A set of literary genres, represented with a perfect balance, which constitutes its greatest added value.
The book was written to fulfill a promise of love made by the author to the main protagonist, Alexandros Panagulis, her lover, poet and prominent political figure. Leave a direct testimony on how one man had never bowed his head to the thousand faces of Power, until the ultimate sacrifice. A gift for everyone who will read it.
Starting from the day of the funeral of Panagulis, a character halfway between a hero of ancient Greece and a mythological figure, Fallaci retraces with clarity and surgical precision the events that led her to cry bitter tears on the coffin of a love never fully understood. As backdrop the Greece of colonels from the sixties and seventies, suspended democracy and brutally persecuted political opponents, collateral victims of the cold war.
After the failed attempt by the protagonist against Papadopoulos, the head of the military junta that had seized power with a coup would be followed by arrest and torture for many years, before being released. Milestones for the meeting with Fallaci. But what could have been a happy ending was only the beginning of another sentimental and political history.
Despite the consistency in number of pages, we “devoured” the book. For long stretches it was impossible for us to stop reading. Immediately catapulted into history, we saw the world through the eyes of Panagulis, suffered his sufferings and had the same aspirations for a better tomorrow. We also felt in the heartbeat of the writer who, as she repeats several times, similar to Sancho Panza, follows Don Quijote in the battles against the windmills when everyone turns their back on him, until the last of his days.
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Oriana Fallaci, A man, Pocket Books, New York, 1981
Original edition: Un uomo, Rizzoli, Milano, 1979
