Many in Italy’s literary establishment would dismiss Oriana Fallaci as no more than a high-class journalist and, beyond that, a pretentious writer of literary kitsch. She did indeed win world fame for her reportage and interview journalism, which was her bread and butter, but she always regarded novel-writing as her true vocation and won an unprecedented mass readership, both in Italy and beyond, for at least two of her novels. It is in fact not easy to make a clean distinction between Fallaci’s novelistic reportage volumes and her novels. Even when she wrote fiction, her narratives are always closely related to fact and deliberately retain a strongly documentary and referential character. Also, Fallaci’s real-world personality always appears in some guise within her narratives. The…
2828 words
Citation: Gatt-Rutter, John. "Oriana Fallaci". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 February 2017 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=13849, accessed 24 November 2024.]
