katdid 's review for:

The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
4.0
I was talking to a friend about Knausgaard and she brought up Ferrante, and because I had this on my Kindle and was between books I started reading it even though I knew it was a bad idea. And then suddenly to my surprise I'd read a third of it and had to keep going. But I didn't exactly enjoy it, and it really made me angry at one point, because I'm the same age (38) as the protagonist but (after a couple of failed long-term relationships) could represent Australia in singledom and childlessness. And at one point it seemed to me the message of this novel was almost - the one permissable and understandable and universal reason for a woman to have a break with reality is when her long-time lover and father of her children leaves her; that is the betrayal that supersedes all traumatic female life events, and if you are not that woman and your life experiences haven't allowed for a husband and children then the luxury of a breakdown is just one more thing that will be denied to you. Or something like that; it's hard to recapture exactly why it rubbed me the wrong way in that instant. But it's a powerful book, particularly
Spoilerthe sequence where Olga is locked in the apartment with a sick Gianni and dying Otto; and the reveal of Carla as Mario's lover I found pretty horrific.
It's kind of an ugly book, very visceral and corporeal, but I liked that about it, especially because women aren't encouraged to write like that. My heritage is Italian and for the first time I imagined myself if I'd grown up there instead of in Australia, where (despite visits to Italy) I was very removed from anything particularly Italian (my dad wasn't part of the local Italian community and only English was spoken at home).

EDIT 01/06/15: A few days after finishing this I was standing in McNally Jackson bookstore in New York City looking at the Ferrante display (which was pretty alluring) and one of the staff rushed over to recommend the first book of the Neopolitan trilogy to me; she said that she too had read The Days of Abandonment first and found it hard going, but that she loved [b:My Brilliant Friend|13586707|My Brilliant Friend|Elena Ferrante|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1343064947s/13586707.jpg|19174054] and would be very happy if more people read it. Because staff there seem to really know their shit when it comes to books I will probably follow her advice.