The Days of Abandonment
A woman's husband leaves her and she disintegrates. That sentence is the whole novel and it is not enough. Ferrante published it in 2002 (in Italian; English translation 2005) and wrote abandonment with a ferocity that makes most domestic fiction feel polite. The locked-apartment sequence, where the protagonist is trapped with her sick children and a dying dog, is among the most harrowing chapters in contemporary fiction.
Olga is “the woman from hell” to readers who cannot get out of her head, one filing her “among the worst main characters EVER CREATED.” Mario is “nothing more than a cardboard,” so the marriage being mourned never quite exists on the page, and his young lover gets crude epithets in place of a personality. The philosophical stretches read as “banality dressed up as gravitas by purple prose.” The peril beats feel arranged rather than earned, with “that nagging about the door and the lock” singled out. The return to stability then arrives fast and neat after all that unravelling.
The case for it and the rest of the canon open with Pro.
