Have you read The Days of Abandonment ? Did you find it cathartic or triggering? Let’s talk about Ferrante’s unflinching gaze in the comments.
Ferrante writes the female rage that society tells us to suppress. Olga wants to kill. Olga wants to scream. Olga wants to die, but only after she has made Mario watch. Los dias del abandono
Olga, a former actress turned housewife and mother, lives in Turin with her two children and her husband, Mario. On the surface, they are a model intellectual family. But on a seemingly ordinary Tuesday, Mario drops a bomb: he is leaving her. Not for a specific woman (though one emerges), but for a vague, insatiable need for a “different life.” Have you read The Days of Abandonment
By the final pages, when Olga finally turns off the gas stove and opens the windows, you feel as if you have survived a car crash. She hasn’t found happiness. She hasn’t found a new man. She has found something rarer: the raw, trembling will to simply continue. Ferrante writes the female rage that society tells
Locked in her sweltering apartment during a heatwave, with a sick dog and children who don’t understand why daddy isn’t coming home, Olga descends. She stops showering. She forgets to feed her kids. She obsesses over Mario’s new lover, imagining the younger woman’s body in explicit, torturous detail. She even has a violent, near-catatonic breakdown involving a broken faucet and a neighbor.