The Days of Abandonment by Italian writer Ferrante-Hell Hath No Fury

Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.  Elena Ferrante (b. Naples 1943) has the flames of Hell burning off the pages of her novel "The Days of Abandonment."  Olga, a devoted wife to Mario & mother of their 2 young children, is devastated when her husband leaves her for a younger woman.  Olga's outrage whiplashes the reader between pity and repulsion with her behavior & mental state. Olga  mourns "when you don't know how to keep a man you lose everything,…what happens when, overflowing with love, you are no longer loved, are left with nothing."  Olga loses her grasp on sanity.  She becomes obsessed with getting Mario back.  She develops a mania fantasizing on his salacious relations with his lover.  "I thought only of him, of how it happened that he had stopped loving me, of the necessity that he should give me back that love... I made a list for myself of everything he owed me."  The extremes of Olga's anguish impair her abilities to function & care for her children.  Ferrante's piercing writing of heartbreak & shameless days of abandonment is unflinching & convincing.   I admired this elegiac novel of sorrow &  absolution.  "There was no longer anything about him that could interest me.  He wasn't even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall."