Why am I passionate about this?
I have always been more interested in the face a person keeps for the world than in the one they show me, and in the moment the two separate. These five books are where I learned to look for that moment: a physicist who opened locked safes by understanding the people who locked them, an astronomer's kit for noticing when you are being fooled, a woman watching her own life give way, a play built from what goes unsaid, and a marriage where both people lie because they know each other too well. My own novel is about a woman whose surface no one thought to look beneath.
V. S.'s book list on seeing past the face people show you
Why V. S. loves this book
I read The Days of Abandonment in one sitting, which I almost never do, because I could not leave Olga alone in that apartment.
Ferrante writes a mind at the exact moment its walls give way, and I have not found anyone who does it better. What stays with me is how ordinary the collapse is: a door that will not open, a phone line gone dead, a sick child in the next room.
I came out of it shaken and strangely grateful, as if someone had finally described a room I had been standing in.
7 authors picked The Days of Abandonment as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.
From the New York Times–bestselling author of My Brilliant Friend, this novel of a deserted wife’s descent into despair―and rage―is “a masterpiece” (The Philadelphia Inquirer).
The Days of Abandonment is the gripping story of an Italian woman’s experiences after being suddenly left by her husband after fifteen years of marriage. With two young children to care for, Olga finds it more and more difficult to do the things she used to: keep a spotless house, cook meals with creativity and passion, refrain from using obscenities. After running into her husband with his much-younger new lover in public, she cannot even…
