Alla ricerca delle radici, tra presente e passato. L’Isola Nuda di Dunja Badnjević

In this article I analyze the debut novel by Dunja Badnjević, «L’Isola Nuda», looking at it through the lenses of travel literature. Badnjević was born in Yugoslavia and moved to Italy years ago; «L’Isola Nuda» is an autobiographical novel where she narrates the experience of her family, in particular her father, who strongly believed in Tito (who bestowed prominent political roles on him). After 1948, when Tito broke with ussr, Dunja’s father – like many others – was punished because of his belief in the project of a united communist entity led by Stalin. Goli Otok (the island’s real name) is an island nearby Croatian costs that became a concentration camp where Dunja’s father was imprisoned. He survived and years later wrote a diary that Dunja quotes in her book. In the narration we find two levels that allow us to consider this novel as travel literature: the first level is set in the present, where the writer visits the island, now turned into a touristic place with few traces of the past; the second one is based on the father’s diary and it could be considered as a metaphoric journey through his memory and his experience of the camp. The narration switches continuously between the two narrators and the two historical periods: this allows the reader to reconstruct the tragic history of a family and of a whole nation that nowadays no longer exists and towards which the writer shows a deep and inconsolable nostalgia.