You can be alone for many reasons.. There are forced solitaries and solitaries by choice; there are temporary and eternal solitudes; solitudes that lead to madness and others that lead us to pleasure and creation. You can be alone on an island, as Captain Pedro Serrano, that inspired the figure of Robinson Crusoe after a shipwreck in 1526, and the housewife who irons while waiting is also alone, the pop star who takes refuge in his hotel room and the so-called "whale of 52 jerks», that has been singing for thirty-five years at a frequency that no other whale can hear. Based on an extensive bibliography and the lives of great solitaries in history and literature, Map of Solitudes is a fascinating narrative essay that tries to understand this feeling not only in today's society., but in different times and places, from the monks of Santa María de Huerta, in Soria, even the Japanese hikikomori, from Marie Antoinette to Miley Cyrus, from the Nazi Albert Speer to the writer Emily Dickinson. Without abandoning the narrative resources of the novel and once again displaying absolute mastery of the language, Juan Gómez Bárcena explores in these pages a universal and unquestionably valid topic such as loneliness., that does not distinguish between borders, genders or social classes, and which is considered the great epidemic of the 21st century.
