The days of abandonment

by Elena Ferrante

Other authorsAnn Goldstein (Translator.)
Paper Book, 2005

Status

Available

Publication

New York : Europa Editions, 2005.

Description

Once an aspiring writer, Olga traded literary ambition for marriage and motherhood; when Mario dumps her after 15 years, she is utterly unprepared. Though she tells herself that she is a competent woman, nothing like the poverella (poor abandoned wife) that mothers whispered about in her childhood, Olga falls completely apart. Routine chores overwhelm her; she neglects her appearance and forgets her manners; she throws herself at the older musician downstairs; she sees the poverella's ghost. After months of self-pity, anger, doubt, fury, desperation and near madness, her acknowledgments of weaknesses in the marriage feel as earned as they are unsurprising.

Media reviews

Though it's occasionally frustrating to watch Olga hit all the familar marks (one can practically read the signposts: anger, denial, bargaining, depression, acceptance), we still root for her, for her damaged kids, even for the next imperfect man waiting for her attentions.
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Smoothly translated by New Yorker editor Goldstein, this intelligent and darkly comic novel [...] conveys the resilience of a complex woman.

User reviews

LibraryThing member thorold
The structure of this novel is familiar: narrator suffers a personal calamity and moves through denial into a pattern of withdrawal from the world and increasingly eccentric behaviour which leads to some sort of (usually ludicrous) crisis where the narrator descends into full-blown madness for a
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while. This crisis then turns out to have had a cathartic effect and resolved things, allowing the narrator to return to normality. There's a whole sub-genre of these out there. It's a formula, but it mustn't be handled like a formula, because it's dealing with the real tragedies of everyday life: in Ferrante's case, the narrator's husband has walked out, leaving her to deal with kids, dog and apartment. It's also a form that needs to be handled with a degree of lightness: the sufferings of fictional characters can easily become trite or mawkish.

Ferrante does this pretty well: her narrator, Olga, observes her own progress from intelligent middle-class housewife to scary madwoman with ironic detachment, and the flightiest emotional passages are always set against incidents of domestic triviality. But the reader isn't allowed to become altogether detached: when it comes to the big crisis scene, we may suspect from our knowledge of literary convention that everything will be resolved happily, but we can't quite be sure.

As a literary novel, the book self-consciously plays with different meanings of abandonment. Olga has been abandoned, i.e. deserted, by her husband. But she has also abandoned, i.e. given up, part of herself in her relationship with the errant husband, a part which she is now trying to retrieve. Left alone, she becomes abandoned, i.e. wanton, in the sense that she increasingly loses her self-control, uses coarse language and thinks constantly about sex (incidentally, the book has one of the funniest sex scenes I've come across for some time). She has lost her grip on the things that are supposed to be central to her role as wife and mother—the children get hurt, the dog is not properly looked after, the apartment gets into a mess, she behaves violently and immodestly—and it becomes an open question which parts of her life are going to survive the crisis, if any.

Obviously you have to decide for yourself whether this is brutally honest or gratuitously offensive: to me it comes across as shocking, but by no means implausible.
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LibraryThing member michaelbartley
I am giving this 5 stars, because the writer described the emotional stage I had when my last relationship ended. That sense of darkness and pain. When the person that knows you best leaves you I actually felt that at my core I wasn't lovable or even likeable. It is a terrible lonely dark place to
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be. That is the place the main character is in this book. Like me, it takes time and tears to re invent yourself. I did as she does but it is not a easy or straight path. This is beautifully written.
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LibraryThing member REINADECOPIAYPEGA
This was a tough read as it is difficult to read or watch someone slowly lose their mind due to some traumatic event that they can not cope with. I enjoyed it as I could easily relate with so many things written in this book.

The two harshest critics of this book will be women who never experienced
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anything like Olga and can not even imagine such things being done, said and thought, and will judge her very harshly and the other type of woman will be one who actually went thru a very similar situation and found the strength to yank up her boot straps to get it together and feels everyone should do likewise.

It does not work that way - trauma and how one copes, whether the person has children, friends and pets to consider, is individual, and without help, there will be a lot more victims than just the sufferer.
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LibraryThing member grheault
When my husand leaves, who am I? Thrown off kilter, deck of cards identity toppled, pieces scattered about, the main character loses her bearings even though she is now the primary caretaker of two impressionable young children who sense that something is wrong with Mamma. Mamma is dangerous, not
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dealing, off somewhere, and she is not reliable or safe. How awful for a child.

And its no picnic for Olga who has never gotten a stable sense of herself either before marriage or in marriage, who obsesses on the other woman, who suspects neighbors of evil intent. How lonely for an adult.

Abandonment by husband, abandonment as a child, its a nightmare lived in full daylight by a woman who is losing all anchor in a storm of major proportions. Excellent view from 'the inside' of what it feels like to be in this waking dream, and how it might feel to work one's way out.
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LibraryThing member Marzia22
Extremely depressing Italian novel about a woman's decent into madness and recovery after her husband leaves her. Very compelling and well written.
LibraryThing member RandyMetcalfe
At the outset of The Days of Abandonment, the narrator’s husband announces that he wants to leave her. His announcement is void of emotion, reminiscent of Camus’ Meursault. His declaration is also entwined with self-serving professions of his own confusion and weariness after fifteen years of
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marriage. His wife is bemused at first, confident that he will come to his senses. Only gradually does it become plain to her that she has been abandoned, dispensed with, and – with the dawning realization that he has been involved in an affair for more than five years – humiliated. What begins in near tranquillity rapidly transforms as the narrator’s passion takes hold and rends her very sanity in response to her husband’s betrayal. It is a startling descent and entirely riveting. The narrator plummets to an almost bestial level only to, through the force of her own will, reascend, to rebuild her shattered sense of self, and reclaim her equilibrium.

Ferrante displays remarkable control here with her narrator. She never slips into parody, both conforming to stereotypes of the “abandoned woman” (here modelled on a particular abandoned woman from the narrator’s childhood thirty years previous) while at the same time aggressively attacking those stereotypes. It is fabulous writing. The lengthy description of the day in August during which her “madness” comes to a head whilst events conspire to send her almost beyond redemption is harrowing.

The ability that Ferrante displays in bringing her protagonist back from the brink is nothing short of astonishing. She avoids magical solutions as well as crassly romantic ones. And by the end we are certain that we are dealing with a narrator, and no doubt an author, who is entirely whole, grounded, and clear-sighted. Highly recommended.
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LibraryThing member akeela
Olga and Mario have been married for 15 years, when one day, out of the blue, he announces that he has another woman and is leaving. The reality of the abandonment is devastating, and the book is a testament to Olga’s gut-wrenching struggle in the face of the rejection she feels.

I read this book
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in a day and was taken by Ferrante’s ability to capture the raw pain and incapacitation of this woman; the depths she plunges to as she struggles to find her way out of the quagmire that is her new reality. The writing is sparse and unsentimental but the internal battle she wages is real and staggering.

Ferrante is apparently a reclusive but celebrated Italian author who refuses interviews about her books. This book was lucid, intensely personal, and profoundly honest – sometimes uncomfortably so. Ferrante got to the heart of Olga’s pain to such an extent, I wondered if it was biographical.
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LibraryThing member oldblack
One of the more interesting books I've read recently - meant in a nice way! Ferrante describes one woman's reaction to being suddenly dumped by her husband of 15 years. Sure, some of the episodes are quite bizarre, but in that circumstance I can imagine people behaving in a highly unusual manner.
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At times, however, I found her behaviour a little too strange to be able to relate to, even given the personally stressful situation.
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LibraryThing member kakadoo202
not my cup of tea 2 hrs into the book on tape just feels like a very long lamentation. very realistic but too depressing to read for me.
LibraryThing member lamotamant
Olga is a woman engulfed in the keening chaos of abandonment. Abruptly left by her husband of fifteen years, she tries to fend off the fraying ends of her sense of self while taking care of their children. Contrary to Olga's definite perception of "woman" as entity, of the type of woman she wants
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to be in all situations - the type of woman she has always wanted to be perceived as by her husband, even by herself, she becomes scorched and deluged in the aftermath of what has been broken.

Ferrante's The Days of Abandonment reads like a sustained note that collapses a lung. Its prose is dagger-headed, it punctures something vital along the way in both main character and reader. Olga's breaking roils in each sentence. This isn't an easy story to look away from.

Weirdly, I kept thinking of Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl while I was reading this story. Namely that this was more of what I was looking for when I finally read Gone Girl after reading so many rapt and raving reviews of how Flynn was able to write an unlikable female main in such a revelatory way. Ferrante's Olga has an emotional relevance that entrenched me more firmly in this story than I was able to experience with GG.

Olga is an unreliable character, we don't get much past her perception of things and that perception is greatly weighted in a rending torrent of anger, grief, and fear. While the premise of her abandonment is one that many can relate to, many of her actions serve to make her extremely unlikable. I think there's two sides to her being unlikable actually though both play on the common perception of what a woman is allowed to be/to do. First, the emotional side; Ferrante does a very good job of layering in Olga's reactions. A woman consumed by anger or the derailment of grief, righteous or not, is often not palatable to the masses. Simply put, a woman emotionally consumed does not often bother herself with following the rules of "femininity," namely the rule that she is supposed to put herself forth in all things as an object to be consumed by other's purposes instead of her own. Secondly, the physicality of Olga's abandonment, of her anger, leads to bursts of vulgarity that also contradict the ideal of "woman." She speaks vulgarly when agitation breaks through, she beats their dog and fails to save him when he becomes mortally sick, she emotionally abandons her children and allows her anger to sway her ability or desire to nurture them, she instigates sex with a virtual stranger and is angry rather than accepting when he can't perform. I think there are a lot of people that would be able to see that yes, beating your dog and abandoning your responsibility to your children is horribly wrong. Yet there are way too many people out there that would eagerly say that each of these things is vulgar for the sole reason that she is a woman, that would insist on turning a blind eye or a bland excuse towards a man who reacted similarly. Which is why I found this to be pretty satisfying even when it was hard to read because I immensely enjoy reading work that allows woman to equal human without excuse or equivocation.

The Days of Abandonment holds the same flint and fire exhortation for me as The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and The Awakening by Kate Chopin did and continue to do. It's poignant while also simply being an interesting story in and of itself. I was so interested in what would happen that there were a couple brief points that stuttered for me, causing me to go back and reread parts. Past that however, Ferrante remains a strong and enjoyable writer for me.
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LibraryThing member dawnlovesbooks
a woman's husband leaves her and her mind falls apart. very powerful book and i imagine that some women do feel this dysfunctional when their husbands leave them.
LibraryThing member thomnottom
I find it difficult to suss out my feelings on this book. Elena Ferrante's writing deserves a 4 or 5 star review. She paints an aggravated view of an "abandoned" woman and the pain and torment that begins to unravel her life - not just how to cope with the sudden change in her family, but her very
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existence. I truly felt the struggle come alive through the words on the page.

However, much of the middle seemed to drag for me. There was too much (in my mind) repetition. Although much shorter than My Brilliant Friend, I found it a harder book to focus on. Perhaps much of this is on purpose, as a book about a crisis of abandonment should not necessarily be a pleasant read.

For someone more drawn to the subject matter, this is probably at least a 4 star book.
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LibraryThing member BraveNewBks
First book assigned for my MFA program, and it's a doozy. Raw, unflinching depiction of a woman dealing with grief: anger, pettiness, a bit of madness, cruelty, lethargy... it's an ugly picture, but it rings devastatingly true.
LibraryThing member lkernagh
Even though I had just a lukewarm experience reading Ferrante’s My Brilliant Friend / Neapolitan series, I thought I would give the author another chance to “Wow” me. Didn’t happen. Instead, this book left me wishing I had never, ever picked up a Ferrante novel, or at least, not this one.
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Her books – the ones I have read, which now total 5 – are filled with self-absorbed, angry people who feel that someone else (never them) is responsible for their life being “in the crapper”. Ferrante wraps these super annoying, incompetent characters in self-righteous shrouds and has them engage in destructive behaviours that affect the very people they are supposed to love and support, like their own children. Yes, Ferrante is a skilled writer but her subject matter is an exercise in destructive, over the top drama-filled navel gazing that is just tiresome reading. As if thoroughly draining her characters isn’t enough, Ferrante has to drain her readers too.

Overall, this has to be the most annoying story I have ever read. If you have never read Ferrante’s works and are wondering if her stories might appeal to you, I would recommend skim reading the first 50 pages of this one. I have noticed that Ferrante's stories all appear to follow the same formula writing style, characterizations and themes. As for me, I am finished with Ferrante’s books. I am done.
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LibraryThing member jothebookgirl
Dark, disturbing....
I got this title from a list stating if you liked Gone Girl, you should enjoy this one. I don't think they compare.
Some folks commented on the Italianess of the characters and I believe that is one reason this southern girl was so disturbed by the behavior of Mario, Olga,
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Gianni and Ilaria. Carrano, the cellist, to me was a victim.
The Saga begins with Mario walking out on Olga, his wife of fifteen years, and their two children. Olga appears to be blind sided by this.
Olga takes it hard. After all Mario has left her for a younger woman named Carla.
Mario literally just leaves, and does not even leave a contact address or number. He comes back to the apartment occasionally, but lives an entirely separate.
The story gets very painful when Olga, the children and dog become trapped inside the four walls of the apartment with no means of outside communication.
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LibraryThing member ZeljanaMaricFerli
Not as good as the Neapolitan Novels, but kept me reading on. This is undeniably good writing which goes deep, and deals with so many darkest parts of female personality with an uncomfortable ease. The first part of the novel was really, really good. That being said, I did not like the subplot with
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her neighbor. It actually ruined it for me, since it gave the whole story a sort of cliche ending with elements of a bad romance flick. What a shame.
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LibraryThing member starbox
"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,
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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.
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LibraryThing member Eavans


This is one of those books you're not going to fully understand unless you've lived it. The Days of Abandonment reminded me of reading Djuna Barnes' Nightwood. I was lovingly given the book by my high school English teacher as a graduation present. I read it, didn't understand it, and promptly
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disliked it. Cue a heartbreak later and suddenly Barnes' words were the only balm that could understand it.

The Days of Abandonment is the same. Ferrante writes with a passion I audibly and physically felt. My book is underlined to near death. She is the author of the angry woman. I have never had a piece of media that mirrored so much my own descent into madness after my "abandonment". There is something so mundane and horrifying about the constant reoccurring memories, the drinking and self-mutilation, the dissociation and depersonalization from your brain breaking under the stress of it all. And Ferrante writes about it. She does it without flinching, without caring how ugly it is.

When I first read it, I was angry. I was angry with Olga, wanted to scream and yell and kill like her, to destroy everything like we had been destroyed inside. Now, every time I open the book to look at passages I cry. I cry at how I once was, I cry for the loss of innocence I suffered, the innumerable scars I have inside that render me angry, bitter, scared, and selfish. I just keep repeating to myself "You're not a knickknack, no woman is a knickknack. La femme rompue, ah, rompue, the destroyed woman, destroyed, shit."

I'm also very happy I read it at the time of my life I'm at now. It took me a long time, but it felt so good when I wanted to shake Olga to tell her that her ex was an asshole. Maybe I'm not totally over it (and don't want to be), because I wish there was more of a discussion of her ex-husband's /faults rather than her resignation. Well, I guess seeing his new relationship doomed to fail is all the glee we get, but I wanted some more evil Olga :')
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Language

Original language

Italian

Original publication date

2002 (original Italian)
2005 (English: Goldstein)

Physical description

188 p.; 21 cm

ISBN

9781933372006

Local notes

fiction

Other editions

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