Novel: A Man

Overview

Oriana Fallaci recounts a fierce, intimate portrait of a man whose courage and convictions shaped both public history and private life. The narrator loved him deeply and admires him fiercely, presenting his biography as memory, testimony and imaginative reconstruction. The setting moves between a repressive Greece under dictatorship, the exile and campaigns for freedom, and the small domestic spaces where politics and tenderness collide.
The central figure is both a political actor who tried to resist authoritarian rule and a fragile, contradictory human being. Scenes of daring action and brutal imprisonment rub shoulders with moments of tenderness and quarrel, so the reader sees heroism and ordinary vulnerability at once. The narrative treats heroism as an ethical stance rather than a spectacle, insisting that courage is rooted in conscience, refusal and suffering.

Narrative and Structure

The book unfolds as a mosaic of memories, reported episodes and fictionalized scenes, shifting freely across time. The voice is intimate and often prophetic, addressing the absent man, recounting conversations, reconstructing interrogations and reliving escapes, hunger strikes and public battles. This nonlinear approach keeps political history close to feeling, so maps of events morph into moments of sensation and moral reflection.
Rather than offering a conventional biography, the text fuses reportage and lyric outrage. Private scenes, laughter, jealousy, tenderness, balance public acts of resistance. The interplay of close-ups and panoramic recollection keeps the man alive as both symbol and flesh, preventing simplification while elevating his choices into a model of resistance against complicity and cowardice.

Central Themes

A Man meditates on integrity under tyranny: what it costs to refuse compromise, how loyalty to ideals shapes identity, and how love survives or fractures under political pressure. The narrative interrogates the meaning of heroism when institutions betray the common good, arguing that moral courage often demands solitude, suffering and a willingness to be misunderstood. Loyalty becomes both a political stance and a fragile human pledge tested by betrayal and bureaucracy.
The book also explores grief and mythmaking. Mourning here is not private consolation but a political act that refuses to let a life of resistance be reduced to rumor or scandal. Fallaci probes how memory constructs meaning, how intimate attachment can illuminate larger ethical truths, and how the end of a single life can expose the corrosion of public ideals.

Style and Impact

Fallaci's prose is combustible, candid and often accusatory. Her sentences alternate between lyrical tenderness and jagged denunciation, mixing precise reportage with confessional heat. The narrative voice is unapologetic, impatient with hypocrisy and relentless in demanding accountability, yet capable of delicate observation that humanizes its subject.
The book provoked strong responses: admired for its moral urgency and emotional force, criticized by some for closeness to its subject and for blending fact and fiction. Over time it has remained a striking meditation on resistance, an example of literary commitment where personal love becomes a lens for political truth. The portrait endures as both homage and challenge, urging readers to consider what it means to choose honor when every power whispers compromise.