5/5 emotional bruises.

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.

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.

Her prose is addictive in its brutality. There is no filter. We are inside Olga’s skull as she oscillates between lucid analysis (she knows Mario was mediocre, that the marriage was dying for years) and primal desperation (she would do anything, degrade herself any way, to have him back).

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.