By Elena Ferrante
I read this in like five hours on the 29th of April, 2025, on a gorgeously sunny day in the park.
It’s about an Italian woman whose husband leaves her for another, causing her to enter a spiral of depression, despair, and mania, until she begins to recover.
It’s one of those books that made me feel sullied by reading it? Not because of any part of the material, just the brilliant depictions of a whipsawing mood, intense nostalgia, random hatred and pallid apathy; it felt infectious, as if by reading it it would jump out and lodge in my brain, or else I would never escape the book and my thoughts would be permanently affected.
Being written in an intensely absorbing stream-of-consciousness made it all the more effective and difficult. We’re left with an understanding of the miasma of pain and longing her husband’s departure caused her, but interestingly our lack of any relationship with this husband meant we had a clearer view of his awful and banal behaviour, making it a part of the book’s impact that we marvel at her emotions over such a bad (or perhaps just normal) person. After all, considered over a whole life, everyone is a sinner, an NPC, and a miracle.
Ho ho ho, pithy one-liner with a little throwaway pop culture at the end, can I write a sad girl lit piece now.