The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
Review of The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante & translated by Ann Goldstein
“Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.”
The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante (2005). Published by Europa Editions.
This is my second Elena Ferrante novel; the first was The Lying Life of Adults. I wasn’t as big of a fan of The Lying Life of Adults because it seemed to drag on forever, although I was absolutely in love with Ferrante’s writing style.
It’s so clear and crisp, and I remembered that when I was wandering through my local library one day. It must’ve been fate that I ended up in the fiction section of authors with the last name “F,” and after I grabbed a collection of Fitzgerald’s short stories, I ended up in front of the Ferrante books.
My research niche is women’s empowerment outside of male contexts, so the cover is what drew me in. I liked how the woman was tastefully nude, not sexualized, and the soft, more muted colors of the cover. The title was the second part to drag me in, and I picked it up. Clocking in at only 188 pages, this is a novel that doesn’t take long to read at all. It took me roughly two hours to finish it.
Onwards with the review!
As a woman’s husband leaves her for a much younger woman, she learns to move on.
Olga’s husband has left her for a twenty-year-old. This is the start of the novel, when he walks out of the home for what she dubs as a “girl.” They knew the girl beforehand; she’s the daughter of a family friend, a windowed woman, and Olga initially suspected that he was having an affair with the friend.
This was when the girl was fifteen, making it a bit creepy, but Olga quickly came to realize that it was the younger girl that was the problem. Their two children are young and attached to their father, so when he leaves, everything goes to hell.
Olga initially really loses it and goes through all of the stages of grief. First she’s sad, constantly lethargic and crying. When she takes the kids out to go shopping, she gets angry and leaves them behind. She then has a blinding rage that strikes hot; when she spots her ex-husband and the girl outside of a bank, she strikes him and tries to rip the girl’s earrings off. At the same time, the bills need to be paid and they’ve lost their telephone while the dog is poisoned.
What I liked about this novel is that it is unapologetically female. There are no slandered excuses for how she’s misbehaving and our main protagonist is allowed to wallow in her grief. She goes to the neighbor downstairs and tries to seduce him in a drawn out and slightly uncomfortable sex scene.
She sees herself as sexually undesired by her husband, leading to her downfall, which I found to be a direct reference to aging and how women can only feel useful in some contexts when men want them sexually.
That scene makes this into a shift where Olga is seen as something more than a sex object. The neighbor doesn’t get an erection, which upsets her, forcing her to work harder for what she wants, but it’s from this moment onwards Olga no longer thinks about how she’s supposed to be sexy or attractive to men.
This is the beginning of her closure, and while things continue to go to shit with the dog being poisoned, she still manages to climb out of the hole she’s created.
It’s also not her fault at all that this has happened. Her husband couldn’t keep it in his pants and had to chase a younger girl, and it shows that he won’t be any better when Olga notices at the end that he looks tired and like he’s gained weight.
At the end of the day this leads into a narrative that Olga is the redeemed ex-wife who, after originally falling apart, has now been able to become the better person. It’s a cliché story, one that we’ve seen again and again.
Overall Thoughts
I personally didn’t care much for this novel. It’s not as good as Ferrante’s later work, and while I did enjoy the setting of Italy and the prose itself (this is an earlier Ferrante novel so it isn’t as good as her later works, she hadn’t had the time to refine it), I didn’t care for her protagonist or the spoiled kids.
The dog dying was symbolic (it was her husband’s and he left it behind too), but it also felt like it was forced and unnecessary. If you sound interested in this kind of work, give it a shot, but I wasn’t too impressed.
