Daria Bignardi, how beautiful it is to suffer

This article is published in number 6 of Vanity Fair on newsstands until February 8, 2022

THEThe ritual, he says, was always the same, every day of the winter: «I would come back from school, have lunch and then go to the library in the living room and get a book. I would sit on the sofa and stay there until dinner time, except for a short break to have a snack with tea and biscuits ».

Ten years like this, from five to fifteen, have made Daria Bignardi a world champion in fast reading, an expert on Russian and French classics (“The books my mother had from the University were many but not infinite: I read them all at least three times “) and a precocious container of maternal anxiety: outside, there were the fog of Ferrara and the thousand dangers of the world. “If I was at home she was quiet. Those afternoons of compulsive reading weren’t exactly my free choice, but I soon settled into them as if in a kennel. I liked my life as a squirrel. I was alone, but in the company of the thousand stories whose door I opened by turning the pages, ”she says.

The ritual, then, always ended in the same way: with kisses on the cover. “Three kisses if the book I finished – which usually happened the day I started it – I liked it so much, two if I liked it enough, one if so-so. Kisses were my review. I would get up from the sofa to go to the table and my head was spinning because I was still somewhere else ».

The ritual ended, then, really only when adolescence and life came knocking forcefully on the door, and forced Daria to get up from the sofa and participate in other rites (parties, love) taking with her, however , at least a couple of things: the passion for books (he has 3,000 at home, placed in alphabetical order during the first lockdown) and the certainty that some of these can change us, and not necessarily for the better. The last of her, of her book, which is called, is dedicated to both of these legacies Books that have ruined my life – and other melancholy loves (Einaudi) who, as the title promises, talks about books, but as the subtitle reveals also, and above all, much more. An adventurous book in the true sense of the word because, as writer Annie Dillard explains with her bee theory, when you follow one thought it leads you to another. And so each page opens like an unknown land.

Books are usually said to save lives
«It may also be true that they save you, but I wanted to isolate a different feeling that I feel very mine, and I think of many, which is the pleasure of suffering, and which I have learned from books. I set out on this path without knowing exactly where I would arrive. In my hand I had only three volumes which, I am convinced, hurt me: The forest of the night by Djuna Barnes, The mean demon by Fëdor Sologub e Thus spoke Zarathustra by Nietzsche. They hurt me so badly that one of these, The mean demon, I can’t even open it. But when I did it for the first time, at 13, he showed me what evil was. The world, I understood then, was not that of the Young Marmots and Mickey Mouse, in the books there was real life, including pain ».