The Days of Abandonment

Elena Ferrante is very interested in demonstrating how the personality - almost always female - disintegrates under the pressure of trauma. We have an example of this here in the form of middle-aged Olga, mother of two young children, a struggling writer, whose husband of fifteen years deserts her for a younger, more attractive woman. Over the following months we witness how this shock invokes anger against her husband and his mistress, her slippage into a fractured, destabilised world of sense, and, as time goes, by her fragile attempts to reach out for help - help which is invariably sabotaged by her anger and need for solitude. Ferrante takes the risk of making her central character, the main and only point of view, unsympathetic for the most part; it mirrors the nightmare that Olga's life is threatening to descend into. Not only is she losing touch with her emotions, seeing the structure of her life as a wife and mother collapse, she seems to be losing control of the physical world too in ways that verge on the bizarre; for example, the house is invaded by ants; her dogs slowly dies of poisoning; she and the children get locked in the house because the key to the front door of the flat won't work; she requires her daughter to hammer rhythmically on the floor with a hammer... These are metaphors for the way her inner life is disintegrating.Two thirds of the way through this harrowing tale you might think that we are heading for a descent into hell. Not so. Ferrante pulls her punches here and returns to the plausible and the realistic: a slow recovery takes place, as it would for most people in the same situation. Olga painfully adjusts to the life of a single mother. This takes several forms: she gets a full time job; she reconnects with her husband so that they can share the care of the children; she discovers that he is not the man she used to love and shape her life around but a hollow man, one she can be indifferent to; and she makes the first tentative moves towards another love interest. On the way she invests in a certain amount of self-hate and reappraisal, which leads to a strangely blinkered, emotional erratic behaviour, not least with her children, but her ultimate sense of balance and self-esteem reasserts itself. Some readers may be disappointed by this rather tame ending, especially as what preceded it was so uncompromising, seeming to head in only one direction. Did Ferrante chicken out here? Or did she bow to the demands of realism? My feeling is that she did not go as deep as the text was signalling, certainly no where near as she showed she was capable of in her later Neapolitan quartet of novels, which is why I give it four stars.Ferrante is brilliant in her use of the first person voice - urgent, intimate, emotional. In this eternal triangle though, wife, husband, lover, we only get the voice of one angle, the other two are almost silent. It is in the nature of such personal confessions to be one-sided, unbalanced, blinkered, but the question that kept arising for me was: why did Mario, her husband, leave Olga? It's a question she ask herself, of course, going through a period of self-criticism, but we only get flashes of insights into this, enough to ask ourselves: perhaps it wasn't just because he got tired of her, fell out of love for her, preferred his lover, perhaps it was something to do with her personality, the way she deferred so much to his needs at the expense of her own. People who allow that to happen in a relationship often lose the essential respect couples must feel for each other to remain happy. But aside from this, as with all first person accounts, we have to read between the lines to get a three-dimensional view, we have always to wonder if the narrator is reliable, if this was really how it was. As with all good novels, Ferrante doesn't provide us with all the answers, she prepares us for several possible ones and leaves it up to us.

If you want to wallow after a break up of relationship, this is the book for you. However I gave to say not disappointed in the quality of writing and her ability to describe someone slowly descending into a mental collapse

This book is gripping but agonising and quite painful to read. I found myself dragged into the story and wanting to escape from its pages, but it’s compelling. It is well written and you really feel the protagonist’s emotions with her. It’s quite a quick book to read. It’s nothing like Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, but I loved those and wanted to read another of her books. I’m glad I did but I’m also glad it’s over! I will continue to read her books.

What a drag. I heard this reviewed on Radio 4 and they were raving about it, but whatever they saw in it, I certainly couldn't. Without wanting to spoil it; husband leaves woman, woman gets wildly upset, woman calms down. I found it cliched, self indulgent and unreal. Save your money.

I have read all Elena Ferrante's available books by now. My favourite, The Neapolitan novels I could not put them down until I finished them all. The days of abandonment has been equally absorbing, yet tense and painful to read! The intensity was raw and so real I could feel in my guts the confusion and pain the protagonist was going though. I would certainly recommend this reading.