Les jours de mon abandon

Olga, thirty-eight years old, a husband, two children. A beautiful apartment in Turin, a life made up of marital certainties and little domestic rituals. Fifteen years of marriage. Then, one afternoon in April, a sentence from her husband shattered this serene existence and turned Olga into an abandoned woman. A broken woman. Abandoned, broken. Una poverella, like that neighbor from her Neapolitan childhood whose cries she still thinks she hears at night.
Struck dumb, Olga understands nothing of the alleged "meaninglessness" of the man she followed to Turin, and for whom she gave up writing. The man she wanted to grow old with has become the man who no longer wants her. Olga no longer exists. Or only in her slow decline, in this descent into hell where the earth seems to give way beneath her feet, and events conspire against her: a reconciliation meal ends in bloodshed, her son falls ill, the telephone is cut off for no reason, the German shepherd agonizes, probably poisoned, then the apartment door locks from the inside and Olga finds herself locked in.
Elena Ferrante's book literally throws us into Olga's intimacy, taking us on a journey to the frontiers of madness. With its apt tone and breathless pace, Les jours de mon abandon is a perfectly mastered and original variation on the theme of the abandoned woman.