'Inshallah'
Author: Oriana Fallaci
Publisher: Rizzoli / 1990
Pages: 795
Exceptionally, this time I will not waste time and words about this great author for that would be too long for the readers.
Instead, I am just going to write about the book, written at the height of her career.
It says it is a work of fiction, focusing on three months in 1968, when an Italian armed force was doing peace-keeping in war-torn Beirut.
Although the book describes the chaotic situation in the Lebanese capital, its focus is mainly on the Italian contingent and its different components - from the Sicilian to the northern, from the general to the raw recruit.
The Italians were not the only peacekeepers - there were also the Americans and the British.
The book begins with two kamikaze attacks on these two contingent forces. And ends leaving us doubting if the feared third kamikaze would strike the Italians, even though these did their best to ingratiate with the warring factions.
Those were the days of generalised civil war in Lebanon and the massacres in the Palestinian camps of Sabra and Chatila, the last one carried out by the Christian Falangists with an image of the Blessed Virgin on their rifles. The Christians were even fiercer than their Palestinian Muslim opponents.
The Italians saw their task as being a buffer between the two sides but the frontiers kept being pushed this way and that by the shifting fortunes of the war.
In between their peace-keeping, the different Italians had their love affairs, both the ones they had left at home and the different ones they found in Beirut.
While cannons roared, the book tells us, the love affairs flourished.
Such as the one that hit an Italian blond giant. One day he intervened to stop an Arab chieftain, supposedly his ally, from beating up his wife.
Then, in the middle of the night a woman came for him. It was the woman who had been beaten, a splendid woman now with a disfigured face.
She gestured to the Italian to follow her into a dirty and smelly ruin, used mainly as a latrine, and down some steps and into a room he did not know existed. There she offered herself to him, while her tyrant husband slept off his drunkenness upstairs. She knew of this secret hideout because this was where she used to get her lovers.
There is a comical interlude when a sex-deprived soldier buys a plastic inflated woman who then has to fill in for a real woman.
But the real heroine of the book is Ninette, a splendid and rich upper class woman who does not reveal her real identity.
Then, instead of meeting her Italian lover, she leaves him a letter in which she distinguishes between real love and simple affection.
The story does not finish there and you have to read till the very last page of the book to find out how it ends. And meanwhile there is a whole drama to read about.
And there are also the four or five French nuns, living a simple life in a convent on the slope of the mountain at the centre of the fighting. Love comes into the convent through the interaction with the rough Italian soldiers but not every love is of the carnal type.
Over and above these individual stories there is the overlying theme, summarised in the title of the book - Inshallah - meaning God willing.
What is the right approach to life - seeing it as God-given? Or rather one that has to be carved out by the unbelieving individual?