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A review by reads_eats_explores
I giorni dell'abbandono by Elena Ferrante
4.25
This book gutted me. It’s the rage, the grief, the loss of sense. The visceral, terrifying unravelling of a woman who has just been left — and not quietly.
Olga is a wife and mother who, one ordinary afternoon, is told by her husband that he’s leaving her. No big fight, no drama. He simply walks out. What follows is a descent into abandonment so raw and unfiltered I genuinely had to take breaks to breathe. Ferrante doesn’t just write emotions — she drags them out, bloodied and howling, into the light.
At first, Olga tries to hold it together. She won’t become the poverella, the sad, mad, abandoned woman she once watched fall apart as a child. But oh God, she does. She curses. She forgets to feed the dog. She lashes out at her kids. She rages. She loses the run of herself. She becomes that woman. And through it all, we’re trapped with her — in the home, in her fevered mind, in the unbearable weight of being a woman undone.
Reading this in Italian was its own kind of immersion. Ferrante’s language is precise and brutal, elegant and furious. Her sentences cut right to the bone. There were moments I had to pause and sit with what she was saying about marriage, motherhood, and how women are viewed when they break. The shame. The gossip. The fury that gets dismissed as hysteria.
I haven’t lived Olga’s life — I amn’t married, I’ve no children — but I’ve been in a relationship that pulled me apart and left me in pieces. I think most of us probably have. That hot-cold madness of thinking you’re grand one day, then sobbing over the crumbs of your old life the next? Yeah. That I recognised.
This is a hard book. Uncompromising, but utterly unforgettable. Ferrante forces us to look at female pain not as something poetic or palatable, but as something raging, chaotic, and real.
A stunning, scorching read that burns through the layers of love, identity and survival. Eccezionale!
Olga is a wife and mother who, one ordinary afternoon, is told by her husband that he’s leaving her. No big fight, no drama. He simply walks out. What follows is a descent into abandonment so raw and unfiltered I genuinely had to take breaks to breathe. Ferrante doesn’t just write emotions — she drags them out, bloodied and howling, into the light.
At first, Olga tries to hold it together. She won’t become the poverella, the sad, mad, abandoned woman she once watched fall apart as a child. But oh God, she does. She curses. She forgets to feed the dog. She lashes out at her kids. She rages. She loses the run of herself. She becomes that woman. And through it all, we’re trapped with her — in the home, in her fevered mind, in the unbearable weight of being a woman undone.
Reading this in Italian was its own kind of immersion. Ferrante’s language is precise and brutal, elegant and furious. Her sentences cut right to the bone. There were moments I had to pause and sit with what she was saying about marriage, motherhood, and how women are viewed when they break. The shame. The gossip. The fury that gets dismissed as hysteria.
I haven’t lived Olga’s life — I amn’t married, I’ve no children — but I’ve been in a relationship that pulled me apart and left me in pieces. I think most of us probably have. That hot-cold madness of thinking you’re grand one day, then sobbing over the crumbs of your old life the next? Yeah. That I recognised.
This is a hard book. Uncompromising, but utterly unforgettable. Ferrante forces us to look at female pain not as something poetic or palatable, but as something raging, chaotic, and real.
A stunning, scorching read that burns through the layers of love, identity and survival. Eccezionale!