by Oriana Fallaci
If the imagined barrier that once separated fact from fiction hadn't been broken down by Norman Mailer and Truman Capote, this "novel" would destroy it completely. Fallaci is the formidable Italian journalist known for her provocative interviews with the likes of Henry Kissinger and the Ayatollah Khomeini. The man referred to in the title of this book is Alexander Panagoulis, a real-life foe of Greece's military junta who died in a car accident in 1976. Fallaci, who was in love with him at the time, was convinced it was a political assassination, and she wrote this wildly romantic drama as if it were a letter addressed to the book's dead subject. There are 500 pages of peculiar sentences like "The two ladies looked at you in silence, seduced...listened to you, fascinated. What vitality in this man, what warmth, what fire!" What overwriting! (Simon & Schuster, $14.95)
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