The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
Abandoned by her husband, Olga deteriorates into doubt, distraction, and delusion. The unspooling of her reason is magnetic.
Wow! This raw, intimate book weaves a dark, disquieting spell. I was hooked from page one.
As a narrator, Olga is frank and reflective. There is something guileless about her words, which makes the later chaos and humiliation all the more painful. Olga doesn’t want to be a broken knickknack, a woman destroyed, an Anna Karenina under the train - and yet down she plummets.
Ferrante is at her best with violent imagery: the bludgeoned lizard, the broken wine bottle in the pasta, the beating of the dog, and the alarming image of Olga twisting the key in the door with her teeth. I felt gripped in the vice of the darkest pages.
The days of abandonment are not the days without Mario, they are the days when Olga’s mind abandons itself and her world is held together by nothing more than ants.
An utterly absorbing, ferocious portrait which reminded me of The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
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