A Country, Once : INSHALLAH, By Oriana Fallaci (Doubleday: $25; 608 pp.)

By Oriana Fallaci. A novel. About Beirut. Sounds like a daunting proposition. “Inshallah”--God willing--you’ll get through it.

Perhaps you remember Fallaci, the tiny, tightly wired Italian interviewer who coaxed the hidden cowboy out of Henry Kissinger. She who ripped off her chador while interviewing Khomeini, and sent him fleeing from the room. She who wrote an essay to an unborn child. Or a paean to her dead lover, “A Man.” She who has so many words, such relentless, overwhelming, sometimes deadening passion of every subject. She who has cancer, now.

Perhaps you remember Lebanon. It was a country once, of sorts. A lot of Americans were held hostage there, although since the last was released a year ago, we haven’t heard much about the place. But it, too, has been dying a slow, sporadic death, suspended between remission and oblivion.

There was a time, just a decade back, when the attention of the world was focused on Beirut as it is focused today on Somalia or Bosnia. American troops had gone into Lebanon on a humanitarian mission then, too, trying to write a quick end to a long war. But after the massacres at Sabra and Shatila--after the photographs of all those stinking, swollen bodies of women and babies--their mission became less clear. They were there to keep the combatants apart, hoping that somehow peace could grow on all those graves. And instead they wound up dying themselves, and leaving, in the face of a political defeat so severe there was no disguising it as honorable.

Fallaci’s novel is about that time in Lebanon: the three months after that grim morning when 241 U.S. servicemen and 88 French paratroopers were blown away, when all the international efforts to bring order to the country dissolved into chaos. But it is not about the Americans, nor the French, nor indeed the Lebanese. It is about the Italian contingent of the Multinational Force.

They were the one group that was never blown up, and because of that they have not been much remembered in the thumbnail accounts that linger in the history books. But they were there, closer to the action, to the people, to life and death every day, than any of the other soldiers who were sent. The Italian units were posted among the mass graves at Sabra and Shatila. They manned checkpoints at the heart of the city. They were on the front line between the Shiite militias ascendant and the government forces in decline.

Rarely has there been a setting so ready-made for classic tragedy. Everything comes together in Beirut: History. Hedonism. West. East. Tradition. Chaos. We feel the comfortable embrace of our own culture, even surrounded by an alien faith and hostile politics. Fallaci recognizes this, and she goes for the big story--for high drama, broad comedy, epic scope--self-consciously emulating the Iliad, alluding to Hemingway, even striving for some of the ludicrous humor of “Catch-22.”

She reaches for the grand themes of war: love and friendship, death and despair and, yes, the meaning of life. But too many of her characters (103, according to those who’ve counted) are all design and no life, caricatures of whores and grunts, nuns and mullahs. Yes, even caricatures of Italians, from an insufferable Seneca-quoting colonel to a troglodytic Sicilian fisherman. Inexcusably, if not inexplicably, this woman who has spent so many rough years in the company of rough men fails utterly to create credible women. Not since “A Farewell to Arms” have such vacuous heroines wandered through a war. As for the scenes of lovemaking: “The two tender arms encircled his body to drag it down into a well of sweetness, and the squalid room of the ex-brothel really became a Royal Room.” Enough said.

These embarrassments shouldn’t be surprising. Fallaci, so flamboyantly self-involved that she introduces herself as a peripheral figure even in this fictional narrative, has always had trouble hearing any voice but her own. Which probably explains, as well, why the “translation by Oriana Fallaci from a translation by James Marcus” is so awkward. She has made the English prose read the way she speaks. The cursing of the Italian soldiers, rendered literally, is simply bizarre. Elsewhere Fallaci misses straightforward idioms (“cannon fodder” in her text becomes “butchery flesh”) and interpolates absurd Latinisms: “This is for you and your luetic slut of a sister,” screams an enraged Neapolitan noncom.

And yet the pages, all 608 of them, keep turning to the end. There are moments when, despite all the flaws of presentation, all the predictability of the multiple plots and the philosophical blather (Fallaci spews words at the target like shrapnel from a claymore mine--and still misses!), there are enough moments of sadness, excitement, suspense and anger to keep us reading.

There is even a brief moment in the very center of the narrative when Ninette, a character who walks onstage as a besotted siren and exits suicidally, writes a compelling letter to her paramour about the difference between love and friendship, and loss. Some of what she has to say is irresistible. The sergeant to whom she writes loves her for it. The translator who reads it to him falls in love with her, too. So will many readers.

Of course, Ninette is an unabashed metaphor. “I am Beirut,” she writes. All that energy, that need for love, the pleading for succor and the violent response to those who would help, the constant mingling of seduction and rejection, the compulsion to be enigmatic and the fascination with self-destruction are characteristic of Ninette and of Beirut--and, perhaps, of Fallaci as well. She has told interviewers that she left her cancer unattended while she worked on the translation of “Inshallah.” Even after surgery, she continues to smoke.

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.