In A Man (1979), Oriana Fallaci (1930- ) gives a fictionalized account of the life of Alexander Panagoulis, from the day of his unsuccessful attempt to assassinate George Papadopoulos in August 1968 until his death in a highly suspicious traffic accident in 1976. Fallaci, who was Panagoulis's lover from his release in 1973 until his death, gives a disturbingly detailed account of the brutal torture to which Panagoulis was subjected. He is sentenced to death, and when the sentence is commuted because of international pressure, he is repeatedly led to believe that it has only been postponed for another 24 hours. He then endures years of solitary confinement in a prison only several paces square. Panagoulis not only survives, but in his total abandon--especially when he realizes that Papadopoulos needs to keep him alive for propagandistic reasons--he succeeds in mentally tormenting his keepers and in persuading some of his guards to aid him in ultimately unsuccessful attempts to escape.

Panagoulis is a loner, committed to freedom rather than to any ideology. When he is free, even after the dictatorship is toppled, his life is immensely difficult, since he is unable to align himself with any political party. He has contempt for Karamanlis, whom all but the far right hail as a savior, and he seems to hate Andreas Papandreou more than Papadopoulos or the even more ruthless Ioannides. And Evangelos Averoff, to many an enemy of the colonels, one who attempted to depose them, but to Panagoulis the archetype of the hypocritical survivor, becomes his new dragon.

Panagoulis never does what anyone expects him to do; he always chooses the harder path and becomes such a gadfly to so many interests that his unrelenting paranoia becomes justified, as he hurtles toward the death he feels fated for, the victim of an attack on the road that is thinly disguised as a traffic accident. C. M. Woodhouse, however, in his The Rise and Fall of the Greek Colonels, seems to dismiss this account as a symptom of the Greek need to account for every misfortune as being the fault of some malevolent outside force.

Fallaci's love for Panagoulis, although fully sexual, is driven by her abstract view of him as a hero committed to sacrificing himself for his people. Their preconceived, and to a large extent justified, ideas of each other are crucial to their affair, which is underway almost before they meet, he the slayer of dragons, she the justice-loving journalist who chronicles the exploits of such men and women. Told in the second person, her account, a paean to her dead lover, cannot be free of bias, but it is searingly persuasive.

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