Solitary - Gladys Ambort

As a young student and activist for a different social order, Gladys Ambort fell victim to political repression in the Argentina of the 1970s. Denounced by her college professor, she was incarcerated for three years, during part of which she underwent solitary confinement in a small, isolated cell. Solitary is her account of this era of her life, including her battles with alienation, truth, reality and uncertainty. She also describes the ‘nothingness’ to which her captors reduced her, which lingered for decades as she rebuilt her life in exile — sounding a warning to others: ‘Never again’.

Extract: ‘The fear caused by nothingness makes sanity explode. The threat of nothingness dominates us. It is stronger than any will, any intention. Nothing subverts our decisions more easily than the impossibility of resisting the threat of nothingness. There is no determination to oppose it, no mental structure against it, no human theory that can withstand it’.
(Chapter XXV).