Oriana Fallaci adores the exclamation point. "Ho! Ho! Bravo!" she'll bark when pleased, a wonderful, deep-chested exhalation, cigarette smoke swirling. Disappoint her, and you get mini-explosions issued in quintuplicate: "No! No! No! No! No!" When she is angry, she shouts, "Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong! Wrong!" with her arms swinging like a windmill. Occasionally, Fallaci will plant her palms at her ears, rocking back and forth as if she's so riled she might be forced to take her own head off and throw it at the numskull who's wormed his way into her presence. In her latest novel, "Inshallah," a suspenseful morality play set in Beirut, even her characters' questions are often punctuated like this: !?!

Bold and frenetic has always been the Fallaci way--the journalist-novelist as maximalist, racing off to cover wars and revolutions, going toe to toe with the biggest tyrants on the globe, producing articles and books and speaking out undaunted by anything. But there is something foreboding beneath all the noise and bluster these days. Now there's a noticeable hitch in Fallaci's stride, and her voice sometimes falters. At 62, she feels misunderstood, besieged by her own reputation. And she has fallen ill. Even her body, it seems, has betrayed her.

Fallaci was at the height of her powers when I first met her 12 years ago. She entered rooms like a dervish, and it was difficult to squeeze in more than a few words between her interlocking stories and distended declamations. She had rattled into San Francisco to promote "A Man," the fictionalized biography of her late lover, Greek revolutionary Alexandros Panagoulis.

"Argh, argh! No questions! No questions! All the questions, all the questions! If they had read my book there would be no more questions!" were the first words she spoke. But she sat talking for several hours anyway, rolling her hair to the top of her head, bunching her skirt beneath her thin legs and then spreading it out along the couch in her hotel suite and rolling her hair again in a hyperactive, rhythmic cycle.

Seeing her now, on this November night, is a study in contrast. "You haven't changed at all. I have changed--a lot ," she murmurs. Fallaci lays herself out on another San Francisco hotel couch, leaning back and speaking in a guttural whisper. Gone, for the moment, is the sharp-boned tiger of a decade ago. In her place is a petite woman in a black dress, her light brown hair, flecked with gray, falling straight to her shoulders. She slips high heels from her tired feet, but her hands stay in motion, long fingers fidgeting with what must be her 40th cigarette of the day as she talks about " 'Inshallah,' my child, this book." But she keeps circling around to the passages about dying. "I am obsessed with death," she admits. Her face is immobile, a lined mask filled with anguish.