Talk:Inshallah (novel)

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Hello! I edited the first 'Inshallah' (in brackets) to 'Insciallah' because I'm reading the Italian copy right now and that's how it's spelt, but the title of the article still refers to it as 'Inshallah', and I didn't change it further on because I don't know if 'Inshallah' is the proper Arabic word, or the English translation; I changed it in that brackets anyway because if anyone was looking for it in a library here it would have that title. Just to explain.

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AfD on pl wiki. Asking @Cunard for the rescue :) Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 04:23, 29 September 2023 (UTC)

Hi. Here are some sources about the book Inshallah:  The review notes: " Teeming with characters, dense with ideas and laden with unresolved existential questions, "Inshallah" at times exhausts the reader with its length and intensity. Yet the warmth of Fallaci's humanism, the breadth of her knowledge and the daring of her ambition ultimately make it moving as well."  The review notes: "This book that was certainly her most ambitious, and could be her last, might have been a monument to her talents and her passion. Instead it remains as a tribute mainly to her ego, and to a place that overwhelmed even Oriana Fallaci."  The review notes: "Some Muslim literary critics have scored the book for reinforcing so powerfully a simplistic, destructive stereotype of the Arab world: that it is nothing but hatred and murder. This is a potent, valid point. But "Inshallah" fails at a more basic level. The characters are cardboard cutouts, drawn with a simplicity that makes daytime soaps look as if they were written by Marcel Proust."  The review notes: "But despite its awkward eclecticism and lack of style, despite or because of its invasive subtext, "Inshallah "succeeds in gaining the reader's interest and respect. It is a brave attempt to deal -- be it only metaphorically -- with a change of such scope that many Americans may not be quite conscious of it yet. ... Fallaci's work is heart-felt and thought-provoking. It tells us little about the civil war in Beirut that we hadn't gleaned from the weeklies, but much about what people cling to when worse comes to worst."  The review notes: "Indeed Inshallah has sold more than 600,000 copies in Italy and is being translated into 22 languages, including Chinese, Greek, Portuguese, Korean and Norwegian. Perhaps the book translates well because the language of pain is universal. One needn't know much about the historical roots of civil unrest in Lebanon to appreciate the skill with which Ms. Fallaci unites fact and fiction in this tome -- one page shy of 600."  The review notes: ""Inshallah" has its poignant moments, its engaging characters and compelling anecdotes. It labors mightily to make the reader confront the absolute hell of urban, ethnic-religious warfare. But finally there are just too many tedious, relentless details, too many anecdotes and too many characters (more than 150). In its huge sprawl, "Inshallah" loses the very intensity Fallaci pursues."  The review notes: "The 599-page epic is Ms. Fallaci's tour de force, her goodbye to the rigidity of journalism, her love song to the power of fiction. She admits that she will exploit journalism if she has to. But if she doesn't need it, she will not go back." <li> The review notes: "It is hard to love a novel about war. Oriana Fallaci's Inshallah is a relentless, horrific epic that nevertheless keeps the reader turning pages. You may not want to. You may wonder why you keep going at all. You may feel angry. You may feel that the hopelessness is too unbearable. ... Sadly, the female characters in Inshallah are too one-dimensional to care much about. They are little more than simplistic personifications of Love, Eros and Chastity. Or, in the passage that traces the journey of a bullet through a soldier's brain, the she is Destruction Without Conscience - the essence of the Beirut conflict:"</li> <li> The review notes: "Inshallah is an intense book, probably too intense for its own good. One thing it is not, however, is history. Fallaci, appearing on a recent Larry King Live show, said she learned more about Napoleon by reading War and Peace than from studying historical accounts. The implication is one may learn much about Mideast insurrections by reading Inshallah."</li> <li> The review notes: "Inshallah, Oriana Fallaci's long novel with its engrossing characters, makes the war in Lebanon come alive for us as even the television pictures at the time could not do. ... This is an absorbing book, a study of chaos, of mankind's ability to make a cruel mess."</li> <li> The review notes: "She is most effective exploring the anguish and perplexity of the Italian soldiers who struggle to understand the meaning of life and death in the midst of someone else's conflict. As for the people of Beirut, one will have to go elsewhere to get a more balanced portrait of the strengths and weaknesses of their humanity. It can't be found in Inshallah."</li> <li> The review notes: "In a prodigiously ambitious project, Oriana Fallaci, who appears in the novel as 'the Saigon journalist', recreates Beirut 1983. Her myriad characters - mostly Italian soldiers and Lebanese of all ages and factions - might scramble even Einstein's memory, but then the book's avowed search is for 'the formula of Life'."</li> <li> The review notes: "When Inshallah was published in its original Italian version two years ago, it was hailed by critics as a work of genius fit to stand beside War And Peace. I certainly have not reviewed anything remotely this good in 15 years at the job. Fallaci's novel (in essentially her own translation) is, beyond doubt, one of those few examples of writing that we eventually term classics of literature - beyond the reach of time and fashion. It left me trembling, drained and exhilarated."</li> <li> The review notes: "With its complex structure, analogies to Homer's "Iliad," and one character's tortuous quest to discover the formula of life to offset the chaos and death, Fallaci forces the reader to ponder the contradictory concepts of free will and fate. In so doing, she has created a haunting novel to be savored."</li> <li> The review notes: "My point in all this is that in the post-AIDS era, where gay-bashing has become the sport of the ill- informed and the ignorant, a self-proclaimed "liberal" like Oriana Fallaci should be cognisant of the prejudice such words can reinforce and of the actions such inflammatory language may incite.  Nonetheless, the book is a crowning achievement, full of disquieting truths and deeply moving. It is also profoundly depressing and definitely not for the squeamish. But it is her masterpiece."</li> <li> The review notes: "A hulking tome of a book, Inshallah is conceived as a modern-day Iliad. It has a vast cast of characters and explores the themes of life and death, destiny and fate, against a backdrop of a brutal war. In this case, the setting is the civil war in Lebanon and the majority of the characters are members of the Italian peace-keeping force which was sent to Beirut. Like Homer, Fallaci displays a fondness for stock-epithets, but that is where the similarities end."</li> <li> The review notes: "I heard an author as full-blooded as Oriana Fallaci recently boast at a reading that at least his book was not about someone's second divorce. Ms. Fallaci can make a similar assertion. She is profligate with plot and detail, and her openhandedness and the inherent tensions of her large story should insure that most readers will overlook her equally spacious faults, including the banality of her asides."</li> <li> The reveiw notes: "War novels often describe one war in terms of another, as "Catch-22," for example, looked back on World War II through the absurdist sensibility of the Cold War. It is hard to resist the notion that Fallaci's Beirut serves as a downscale Italian Vietnam, complete with meaningless commitment, indistinguishability of friend and foe, and the follies of macho pomposity and bravado. Against those forces she sets the expansive warmth and rich humanity of the Italian character-a decency, she seems to be saying, which, set against the relentless forces of Entropy, is not quite enough."</li> <li>Swoboda, Victor (1993-01-16). "Oriana Fallaci turns her obsessions into a passionate novel" (pages 1 and 2). Montreal Gazette. Archived from the original (pages 1 and 2) on 2023-10-01. Retrieved 2023-10-01 – via Newspapers.com. The review notes: "She calls it "my miniature Iliad." Indeed, Oriana Fallaci's novel, Inshallah, evokes Homer in both subject and scope. And though in literary stature it must, of course, defer to the ancient poem, there is nothing miniscule about its length. Having reported from Vietnam, described torture in Greek prisons and interviewed just about every important leader in the world, Europe's foremost chronicler of human passions has turned the sights of her high- calibre pen on the civil war in Lebanon. Inshallah embodies a lifetime's experience of observing war and the people who wage it."</li> <li> The review notes: "Read today against the backdrop of another bloody fratricidal conflict in the former Yugoslavia, Oriana Fallaci's long-awaited novel about Lebanon could have been a transcendent work of literature. Regrettably, due to some artistic choices made by the author, it is instead over-long and seriously flawed."</li> <li></li> </ol>Cunard (talk) 01:05, 1 October 2023 (UTC)


 * Thank you. Tagged with 'sources exist' for now. <sub style="border:1px solid #228B22;padding:1px;">Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus&#124; reply here 06:56, 1 October 2023 (UTC)