It’s been a strange news weekend in Italy. Not that I’ve seen the TV news today, or even listened to the radio. But I’ve seen the newspapers and I’ve heard all the people I’ve met talking about the same stories. (Not the one about the Pope offending Islam and then apologising, which sounds like the start of some very unrealistic bad joke.)
Oriana Fallaci died on Friday and is to be buried on Monday in a cemetery in Florence. (She was reported to be a self-declared atheist.)
(And at this point I feel obliged to quote from John Donne: “No man is an Iland, intire of it selfe... And therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; It tolls for thee.”)
It seemed to take some sinking in. Maybe people wondered whether the doctors could actually identify the death without fear of contradiction from the somewhat argumentative writer. So this weekend has been full of articles about her (mostly in papers published, surprise surprise, by her publisher, or TV channels which supported her latter statements). There’s been very little analysis of her writing. She was a “great writer” but noone I’ve seen in the news has asked “why was she great?”, or “where does she rank as a writer?”. (I might not have been looking in the right places - for reasons that will become clearer later.) Valentina bought the Corriere this morning with its Oriana-special so that I wouldn’t remain simply a prejudiced Oriana-phobe. My judgement, for what it’s worth, is that she was a good features writer (extremely elegant, well-constructed prose, trying to cover the subject from a variety of perspectives) who was very derivative of American writers and journalistic styles before they were well-known in Italy - I immediately thought Truman Capote and The New Yorker, John Updike hacking between novels. Reading her in Italian you become aware that translating her work into English would have been a soft assignment. She comes over, from the very start of her career, as extremely arrogant and also surprisingly banal for someone held in such high national esteem. (I haven’t read ‘A Man’ or ‘To an Unborn Child’ and perhaps these are not banal observations on their subjects.) She has a massive confidence in herself and a lack of self-doubt that enables her to talk to all these world leaders on an equal footing. She was ahead of her times in many ways.
This aspect of her work possibly seems most relevant now: the interviews with the worldfamous. The media have become obsessed with fame, rather than reporting what people are famous for; someone who was so close to such fame must have been worthy of fame herself, there’s no need to think about whether or not she was a “great writer”. Her war reporting doesn’t get the same attention. Nowadays we’ve been distanced from the tradition of ‘war reportage’ by embedded journalism and 24/7 live colour coverage of distant battles. We’d prefer words not to get in the way of the images. “I’m better than Hemingway,” is a hollow quotation in 2006. Where was he when the twin Towers fell? Amidst all the fawning coverage of her it’s hard to tell quite how much danger she put herself in. You wouldn’t have found me in Saigon in the Sixties but there seem to be a remarkable number of photos of her in some debris-strewn location with her helmet on, carefully applied make-up and a fey expression. She put herself in literary danger by making the direct comparison: she’s not there; she’s too banal, too full of herself to be able to get close to the people she’s writing about. Her comparison leaves you thinking that being suicidal was all she had in common with Hemingway. Her stuff would have made a good (ignorable) blog rather than a compulsive book.
Then you get to the psychology and that’s pretty irrelevant except that she was so full of bile and contempt, and so arrogant and banal, that what she was left with to write, even before September 11, was her vicious preaching of hatred. Spending her last years in Florence at least saw her avoid arrest for inciting racial hatred and acts of terrorism (which she should have been arrested for IF she had lived in London, and had been a Muslim man writing the equivalent things).
The other story is the resignation of Marco Tronchetti Provera from Telecom Italia. Frankly I don’t see how it’s possible to trust / believe / take seriously a businessman who has his eyebrows done in such a way (any man who has his eyebrows done at all, in fact) but then I’m Anglo-Saxon, and I always quite admired
Denis Healey. There must be issues beyond his appearance, for example his tentacular involvement with so many other companies, but this isn’t the place for them. Beppe Grillo will certainly be working on the case.
What I know for a fact is that since July 17th we haven’t had Telecom’s broadband service (the lynchpin of his new strategy apparently, until he jumped, and what Murdoch and the others were sniffing around) in our house, and it’s a result of their mistakes. (The reason I haven’t been looking at other sources for discussion on la Fallaci’s literary prowess.) I have listened to some of Valentina’s numerous calls to Telecom. I have heard her make many ‘solleciti’ to the call centre people; I have heard her say, ‘yes, I would like to make another ‘reclamo’, but I don’t see what difference it makes to your organisation’. But now I know that it has made a difference.
My own version is that Tronchetti Provera was in a desperate most-important-meeting-of-his-life meeting with Sky executives trying to explain to them how his new strategy (it had come to him on his yacht off Sardegna) was no longer convergence - that was the past - but media, and broadband would transform Telecom into a major media company, and this was why Telecom’s national coverage made them more than worth the €41 bn debts he’d racked up over the years (yachts for inspiration aren’t cheap). It was at that point that the Sky executive put on the table the folder of ‘reclami’ from pissed-off Telecom broadband clients, assiduously stolen by their investigators. ‘I don’t think that we can seriously value at 41 billion a company with such abysmal levels of management and customer service, do you? This is just a sample, Mr Pronchetti.This is just the tip of your rotten incompetent iceberg.’ And the list of Valentina’s calls and the solleciti and reclami is there in his hands. He reads and says, ‘I think I have no option but to resign with immediate effect.’
If I were writing some post-bourgeois novel I would then invent a scene in which Fallaci interviews Tronchetti. It would be very uncomfortable. Fallaci’s questions on his marriage to a Muslim model would make for her greatest challenge and bring about his most magnificent shifts of paradigmatic strategical planning.
Well, that’s my version of the news. As realistic as any of the others I’ve heard this weekend.
