Nostra solitudine

How can we find our place in the world today? In this world. How can we discover a way, a space for ourselves, knowing we are privileged yet still burdened by our own traumas, large or small, alongside the immense suffering of those under bombardment, the oppressed, the poor, the disadvantaged? We are ashamed to admit we feel lonely, yet we are lonelier than ever. Daria Bignardi speaks of it with honesty, irony, and courage. She feels that solitude can be a prison but also a vantage point from which to hear the heartbeat of the world. The world calls her, and she sets off. She goes to Hebron, in the West Bank, to speak with Palestinian prisoners recently released in an exchange. In At-Tuwani, the village of No Other Land, she meets international volunteers who escort children to school each day so that settlers won’t shoot at them. She travels to Vietnam, the only country to defeat the United States, where she discovers the pollution of the Mekong. She witnesses the heart surgery of a newborn in Uganda. She longs to leave social media, sensing that something within them exploits our loneliness in insidious ways, yet she cannot give up her daily Wordle game with her nieces, the banter with friends, the flirting with lovers. Though she writes of the oppressions of our present globalization, occupation, war, patriarchy—this is an intimate, deeply personal book, full of joyful torment, that achieves what literature aspires to: giving words to what we cannot yet see but already feel looming. Without weighing down the ghost it evokes, without stripping it of its magic.