The Days of Abandonment

This story envelopes your sense of romance, the challenges of 'true' love, the 'adventure' of being a 'responsible' parent, and the human spirit when all goes so terribly wrong. What is it that makes a parent responsible? What is it that makes this story so wonderfully Italian? Though this story's theme and narrative is 'universal,' for me its essence is Italian. I've never lived in Japan, but I studied and lived in Italy, and I've been fortunate to travel throughout Italy on many occasions, and this (all of Ferrante's stories) love story, so filled with angst and anguish, is for me an Italian adventure steeped in the aromas and tastes of everything delicious about Italy.

This book is a stomach-churning whirlwind of destructiveness and hate. The reason for the narrator's meltdown is her husband's abandonment of her for a younger woman: "Now at thirty-eight," she moans, "I was reduced to nothing, I couldn't even act as I thought I should. No work, no husband, numbed, blunted" (30). And so the self-pitying wail continues for countless pages. The narrator behaves as if she were the first and only woman to lose a husband. Her reactions are astounding. She is "overwhelmed by responsibilities" (78), she stops cooking and neglects her sick son and sick dog. She can't tolerate her children: "[M]ay be I really wanted to abandon them for ever, forget about them" (65). She wants to "levitate," to detach herself "from the earth"(97).

Throughout the book, the narrator regards herself as a woman who has outlived her "usefulness" (110-111). "Usefulness" is a strange description for a woman, or a man, but given that, we wonder, has she lost, at thirty-eight, her attractiveness as a woman? She sees herself as "a cast-off body" (110). Incredible! Is Italy, in its attitude to women, still stuck in the nineteen-century, or is this the narrator's own individualistic and self-hating misconception? It is also worth noting, in the context of age, that she regards Carrano, her sympathetic neighbor, as old, very old, at fifty-three! This is how she describes him with her characteristic disdain: "What were the secrets of a man alone, a male obsession with sex, perhaps, the late-life cult of the cock. Certainly he, too, saw no further than his ever-weaker squirt of sperm..." (50). Really?! Has she never heard of men at Carrano's age, or even much older, who fathered children? Does life in Italy stop at twenty-five?

Apparently, "this threatened dissolution of self," as James Wood describes it, originates in the warnings of the narrator's mother that "women without love lose the light in their eyes, women without love die while they are still alive" (44). And here rises, as if out of the Brontes' misty moors, the specter of the demonized woman, the poverella, an abandoned woman, who tries to kill herself and is shunned by all her neighbors when she returns from the hospital. Of course, our narrator is the new poverella. She is obsessed with her social humiliation and shows few signs of grief over the disappearing husband. She imagines herself as "the salamander, which can pass through fire without feeling pain" (57). To those who hurt her, she gives back in kind. She is "the queen of spades," "the wasp that stings," "the dark serpent." On one of her few exits from the house, she spots her husband with his lover and attacks him in the street "like a battering ram" (70). Her profusion of dark metaphors won't shame Lady Macbeth; but unlike Lady Macbeth, our narrator is neither a serpent, nor even a wasp. Apart from the few drops of blood she extracts from her husband, she neither damages him, nor wins him back. She is a helpless woman "at the very limits of coherence and decency," as Wood defines her, and in her sick imagination, she views herself the star of her own weird and melodramatic text. However, her neglect of her children, and the death of the dog are real enough. She tells us that her friends left her, but I am just wondering why she never seeks the help of a doctor or a therapist. Surely, there are therapists in Italy!

Like Kafka's Gregor Samsa in "The Metamorphosis" and like the woman in Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper," Ferrante's narrator is a domestic prisoner. However, Kafka's bug and the woman who peels down the wallpaper are real prisoners driven to extremes by oppressive father figures they cannot escape. Ferrante's narrator creates her own prison by refusing help and struggle and by choosing instead to destroy her world and future in spectacular fits of temper tantrum. She fails in that, not due to her efforts or growth, but miraculously, through deus ex machina. Gilman's woman and Kafka's bug earn our sympathy; Ferrante's narrator taxes our patience and good-will.

That this book has been so successful in Italy, and in other countries, is, for me, an unsettling enigma.

I thought I already posted a review, but apparently not. It has been a pleasure after reading the first 3 Neapolitan novels to go back to the beginning and see how Ferrante has advanced upon the literary world. I was amused by the misprint at the end of the Kindle edition on the author page that said, "In addiction, to ..." I have to say that I am addicted. I am now half-way through "The Lost Daughter" and have pre-ordered the final Neapolitan novel coming on September 1.

Having been through this recently myself, Ferrante has painted an accurate picture of the disorientation and emotional confusion such an event causes. I especially loved the day she locked herself in her own house. She cannot get her thoughts in order or even figure out what's most important - her dying dog, her sick son or the fact they cannot get out of the apartment. This is what it is like when your world is turned upside down.

Flawed only by a long ridiculous chapter where she (the protagonist) is trapped in a room with her children. Otherwise, a gripping, brilliantly written, insightful journey, right up there with the Neopolitan Quartet.

From the first page you get right inside this woman's mind…as she's losing it. Over the course of a few weeks, after her husband of 15 years suddenly walks out, the reader watches helplessly as Olga lets her life unravel. She no longer has a grasp on the simple things in life like time, eating, shopping, cleaning and caring for her kids. She is obsessed with her husband and his new girlfriend to the point of outright neglect of her children. Yet we understand it, understand Olga and how a life could get to this point. There is a great twist in the middle of the story and a satisfying ending.

Despite an awkward translation with at least two significant mistranslations, this English version is the only way that readers without Italian can become acquainted with one of Ferrante's best novels. It is gripping from the opening lines to the end due to its tight construction and the protagonist's utter honesty. Not a novel for the squeamish who prefer lady-like restraint to female full-bodied confrontation with the hazards of a woman's life.

What an amazing writer Elena Ferrante is! I read her trilogy (4th book coming out Sept 2015) about the two women friends in Naples, and then followed up with this one. Great story. You are there with the narrator all the way.

I love the beginning of this book. Immediately you fall into this layered ,domestically complex world of a woman and mother and wife. And anyone who has lived these three roles knows how each one pulls you in three separate directions. Ferrante perfectly describes this conflict with her visceral language. The middle of the book was more challenging because of my need for a linear ,sensible narrative. But once I gave into the wreckage it was like falling down a rabbit hole and landing in a rumbled bed of someone's deepest intimate feelings. The end is redemptive.

Although the writing was compelling, reading about someone you wanted to kick into action and take responsibility for herself, her kids, and their life was frustrating. I needed more than 2 pages of feeling she turned it around.

The abandoned wife and mother. How many stories have we read on this theme? This one is sad (spoiler alert) because her reaction is that of total surprise, the old refrain, "how could this happen to me?" How could it not, given the history of the world?

Anyway, things go badly. The scorned wife detaches from reality, ignores her children and lets everything go, wanders the streets, and yes, neglects the family dog.

This novel captures the deeply emotional journey of a wife and mother pushed to her limits when her husband abandons her and her children for a much younger woman. Realism at its finest, the novel is often shocking in its precise and intimate use of deep point-of-view, bringing us on a psychological journey, taking the reader into uncomfortable places in the mind of the protagonist.

The Days of Abandonment
Elena Ferrante

This could be dismissed as a book about a crazy woman, but instead a think it’s about a woman made crazy. Made crazy by expectation. Made crazy by routine. Made crazy and unnecessary by abandonment.

I think too it could be dismissed by feminists as a book about a weak woman. Who put all her eggs in her husband. Then though you’d have to ignore the power of a woman’s obligation to her children. How it physically changes her. Matronizes her. Expands her shape. Changes her smells. Ages her. Makes it her fault he left. For not the woman she suspected he might, but for that woman’s daughter.

Women of course can’t compete with time while men can play in a fantasy world, using the power of experience to seduce a girl to stave off the role time plays on his own body. He holds all the power. He can hit the reset button. See the children when convenient. If expectations that he takes them on a weekend when they are inconvenient run high, the former baby sitter can watch them for free, while he does what he rather, and then yell at his former wife that he does not see the children enough. Then complain that he can’t take them as often, that they are ruining his relationship. That they are ill behaved. That it is her fault.

I read on the cover that this book was a great success in Europe. I’m surprised because it does not support any position. It does not forward the cause of being a good wife and mother and does not forward the cause for feminists. Instead it simply lets us see the consequence of what happens to women under a social structure where they can easily be chopped off and thrown over board from a life that was never really hers.

The writing is unusual, making observations I’ve never seen expressed like this. Any woman who has given birth and drained by it, who had to rise to go to work before at all recovered and has walked through months, maybe years, in a haze, who has been left for an upgrade, whose coupled friends no longer call and whose entire social structure collapses as a consequence of divorce, will recognize this story. It’s description of madness, of the stripping of the delicate competency made fragile by the intimidation of self-assured men with patronizing smiles; how that manifests in every day living, in her ability to unlock doors.

I think there is something brilliant about this writer and this book. I think maybe a lot of people would disagree because frankly, it’s a grown-up read. Those who hold on tightly to the fragile security of motherhood and marriage will dismiss it but some will read it with frightening recognition.

I read the four volumes of the Neapolitan series, and liked the first two volumes better than three and four. For me this book stands right up there with the first two Neapolitan novels. This is Ferrante at her best--clearly writing about the depths of emotional experience. She is not a great thinker and does not have fantastic insights into the ills of the world or the effect of quantum physics on our understanding the exploding universe, but she sure does understand the human heart and the range of emotions a woman feels in a difficult family context.

I expect that those who are used to reining in their emotions and don't come to stark terms with their sexuality will have problems with absorbing this book. But for those who have lived through a divorce or even through a difficult family situation, there are few books better.

I felt for Olga as well as for her children and the dog Otto as they lived through the jarring betrayal of Mario's leaving Olga for a younger woman. Ferrante gets the feelings and the facts of such a situation terribly right. Olga is besieged not only by the loss of Mario, but also by the nagging needs of the two kids, who are caught in the middle between a selfish father and an emotionally overwrought mother. One hopes that not all divorces are this bad. But most of them in the end, in my mind are not too good.

Ferrante show us how bad it can get. A striking, unforgettable book.

How this book got on any list of recommended readings is beyond me!! I kept struggling to get through it thinking, surely it will get better. Unfortunately it did not. I have scratched this author off my list and will never read anything written by her again.

I just finished the original Italian version of this book --- a difficult read on many levels. The book is very well written, but difficult to follow at times as the main character, Olga (rather unsympathetic) falls further and further in depression and anger after her totally unsympathetic husband, Mario leaves her. The two children are at times beastly, but that is excusable as Olga's self-absorption in her own pain results in her being neglectful of the entire household. She cannot maintain a hold on the present and constantly is absorbed in the past as she comes to a final nervous breakdown. The tragic death of the family dog finally forces her to get a hold on reality. She instructs her daughter to poke her with a letter opener whenever she sees that her mother is drifting into her trances of self introspection. Ultimately this results in a serious wound and an angry outburst on the part of Olga. This book was a slog, not like the four-part story beginning with "My Brilliant Friend." I learned a lot of new vocabulary and feel a sense of accomplishment that I finally finished the book.

The Days of Abandonment is the second novel by Italian author, Elena Ferrante. When Mario announces after dinner that he intends to leave Olga after fifteen years of marriage, she at first believes this is another “absence of sense”, as Mario referred to his infatuation with fifteen-year-old Carla, five years earlier. She tries to discuss things calmly, as they have always done: “I hated raised voices, movements that were too brusque. My own family was full of noisy emotions, always on display, and I felt that I was inside a clamorous life and that everything might come apart because of a too piercing sentence, an ungentle movement of the body”.

Olga had given up her own ambition to become a writer (“I was young, I had pretensions. I didn’t like the impenetrable page, like a lowered blind. I liked light, air between the slats. I wanted to write stories full of breezes, of filtered rays where dust motes danced… I loved writers who made you look through every line, to gaze downward and feel the vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno”) to support Mario and care for their children. Now, suddenly alone, abandoned with just her two young children, Olga spirals through anger into deep despair.

She alienates friends: “…so even the very few people who still tried to help me withdrew in the end: it was difficult to put up with me. I found myself alone and frightened by my own desperation”; she questions who and what she is: “…perhaps I would understand better why he had gone and why I, who had always set against the occasional emotional confusion the stable order of our affections, now felt so violently the bitterness of loss, an intolerable grief, the anxiety of falling out of the web of certainty and having to relearn life without the security of knowing how to do it”

Olga reaches a crisis point, descending into a dangerous mental and physical state: “I had only to quiet the view inside, the thoughts. They got mixed up, they crowded in on one another, shreds of words and images, buzzing frantically, like a swarm of wasps…”, she behaves in a completely uncharacteristic manner, before she eventually gains a new sense of herself: “Perhaps I remained beautiful even if my husband had rolled up the sense of my beauty into a ball and thrown it into the wastepaper basket, like wrapping paper”.

Ferrante certainly knows how to convey the myriad of emotions, the stages of loss that accompany a marital breakdown. Readers should be prepared for the explicit language that reflects the depth of Olga’s anger. This dark tale, filled with marvellous descriptive prose, has a hopeful ending. A powerful read.
4.5 stars

Elena Ferrante is a very skilled writer, and 'The Days of Abandonment' doubtlessly a very strong piece of writing.

Be warned, however, that - at least beginning from roughly the halfway point - this is not a novel you will continue reading (if you do continue reading it) out of enjoyment. Olga is an incredibly, incredibly frustrating character and being locked helplessly inside her mind for the duration of the book will have your less mature critical side wishing it was she who'd done the abandoning.

On one hand I appreciate the progression (regression) Ferrante exhibits here, but I'm not sure how logically/believably sound Olga's psychological fulcrum really is. But as I do not have the personal experience to comment with any authority on the matters the book touches, I must assume the fault lies somewhere between the pacing and the details Ferrante via Olga chooses to disclose. I cannot decide whether or not Olga is an unreliable narrator, but I still can't shake the feeling that I've been sucker-punched here.

To Ferrante's credit, the book reads like a work intentionally calibrated to frustrate and even suffocate the reader for its narrative objectives, and if the case achieves its goal. But it does this to such an extent, and in so prolonged a fashion at times, that readers may simply choose, not without merit, to turn their backs.

Despite the fantastic reviews, I found this novel to be tiresome and ultimately unreadable. The narrator's reaction to her circumstances is so mired in this swollen kind of hysteria. More than a few reviews have pointed to how truly "female" the perspective is, but this is a very old idea of the internal life of a woman, and I felt completely alienated by her reactions to almost everything. Her lack of self- respect, her passivity, her cruelty, the emotional abandonment of her children, none of these rang true to me, nor did the absolute obsession over the man who left her. If these feelings and reactions were complicated by other polarities, I could perhaps believe the characters more; however, all the characters were so unredeemable that it felt like an allegorical play rather than a novel.

"One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me."
Thus begins the narrative of 38-year old Italian Olga. From her initial calm, her emphasis on self-discipline and quiet, things rapidly slide into madness. With no working phone, full of rage and self-doubt, Olga spends the summer in a disturbed and chaotic world; barely aware of her two young children, struggling to cope with her husband's dog, hallucinating, unable to properly do the simplest tasks...
This is a very graphic novel, very intense, a vivid portrayal of the disturbed mind.

Ferrante's writing is spare and beautiful. She locks onto the narrator, whose descent into chaos and near madness (after her abandonment) is harrowing and vividly portrayed. You want to think that this can't happen to someone but the fact is that it does. There are people of both genders who are virtually driven mad when abandoned by their spouses or lovers. Just read the newspapers! Ferrante is particularly good with dialogue and the character of the narrator is completely convincing. Some of the other characters are not as fully conceived, but she has a laser like focus on Olga, the main character. This book is hard to put down. It ends elegantly, but I won't give it away!

I'm reading this in Italian. Olga, the first-person narrator, whines for the first 50 pages or so, with very slow plot movement. She is devastated by the abandonment by her husband, but we never learn what she misses about him, and she seems to offer very little herself. She descends into a funk in which everything goes wrong at once: an invasion of ants, an ill-advised sexual encounter with a middle-aged neighbor, a sick dog... I'm not quite convinced that she is an aspiring writer, because she just doesn't do anything except wallow in her own misfortune.