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Long known and praised in Italy,

English translations have turned the novelist Elena Ferranti into something of a literary sensation.

Her books have received a lot of attention.

There's television series, movies in the works,

and so on. The fiction, on the other hand, while well regarded, is about as despair ridden as you can

imagine. Very little hope. One of her novellas called The Days of Abandonment begins with Olga's

husband blandly announcing that he's leaving her.

As it's described in the book,

Mario closed the front door carefully and was gone,

with Olga's anguish and rage growing within her.

She's terrified that she is going to turn into

a woman that she remembers from her childhood in the neighborhood who had been abandoned, who no longer even had a name but was simply known as the Pavarela, that poor woman.

Abandoned, Olga, is in free fall. She views herself as unloved and she loves no one in return. She views her own children as loathsome and repellent.

They have consumed her, she feels. First Mario and then the children. And she is like,

these are her words, a lump of food that my children had chewed without stopping, a cud made of

living material to allow two greedy bloodsuckers to nourish themselves.

The morning after her own failed an attempt to have an affair, she awakens in a state of

profound disorientation, she's suffering vertigo of both space and time, she's confusing

...