Janet Maslin
The template for the hot-blooded Italian best seller The Days of Abandonment is familiar, in fiction and in life. But the raging, torrential voice of the author is something rare. Using the secret of her identity to elevate this book's already high drama, the author (Elena Ferrante is a pseudonym) describes the violent rupture of a marriage with all the inner tranquillity that you might associate with Medea. When her book's heroine has the temerity to invoke Anna Karenina approaching the railroad tracks, the analogy is actually well earned.
— The New York Times
Publishers Weekly
Once an aspiring writer, Olga traded literary ambition for marriage and motherhood; when Mario dumps her after 15 years, she is utterly unprepared. Though she tells herself that she is a competent woman, nothing like the poverella (poor abandoned wife) that mothers whispered about in her childhood, Olga falls completely apart. Routine chores overwhelm her; she neglects her appearance and forgets her manners; she throws herself at the older musician downstairs; she sees the poverella's ghost. After months of self-pity, anger, doubt, fury, desperation and near madness, her acknowledgments of weaknesses in the marriage feel as earned as they are unsurprising. Smoothly translated by New Yorker editor Goldstein, this intelligent and darkly comic novel-which sat atop Italian bestseller lists for nearly a year, has been translated into 12 languages and adapted for an Italian film slated for 2006 release-conveys the resilience of a complex woman. Speculation about the identity of the pseudonymous Ferrante, whose previous novel is scheduled for 2006 release by Europa, has reached Pynchon-like proportions in Italy. (Sept.) Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
Library Journal
First published in Italy in 2002, this book tells the timeless story of a married man leaving his wife for a much younger woman. Narrator Olga describes how her husband Mario tells her matter-of-factly about his lover after lunch one afternoon. As a metaphor for her situation, Olga invokes the "legend" of the poverella (literally the "poor woman"), who loses her home, marriage, and financial and emotional stability when her husband leaves her. Olga makes an effort to stave off that fate-she does not scream or rebuke Mario for abandoning her and her young children for a while, instead maintaining an eerie calm. Her emotions eventually boil over, however, and humiliation and anger come off her like molten lava, searing everything that they touch. Olga candidly describes the anxiety, fear, and tumult that lead from her trying to hurt Mario and his young lover to her creating a peaceful home for her and her children. In the end, she finds her own way out. Raw and gut-wrenching, this book will find fans in literary fiction readers but not among the timid. For medium and larger public libraries with contemporary fiction collections.-Lisa Nussbaum, Dauphin Cty. Lib. Syst., Harrisburg, PA Copyright 2005 Reed Business Information.
From the Publisher
Praise for The Days of Abandonment
"A masterpiece...The magic of Days of Abandonment remains the fierce intelligence of its narrator."
—The Philadelphia Inquirer
"The writer is immensely self-aware and her frankness is stunning."
—The New York Times
"Ferrante's novels are tactile and sensual, visceral and dizzying."
—The Guardian
"Nothing you read about Elena Ferrante's work prepares you for the ferocity of it."
—Amy Rowland, The New York Times
"Ferrante's voice feels necessary. She is the Italian Alice Munro."
—Mona Simpson, author of Casebook and Anywhere But Here
"Elena Ferrante: the best angry woman writer ever!"
—John Waters, director
"[Ferrante] describes the female experience so intimately and so vividly that the reader feels like she could (and should) know the writer personally."
—Kat Stoeffel, New York Magazine
"Ferrante puts most other writing at the moment in the shade. She's marvelous"
—Booker Prize-winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, Richard Flanagan
