The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
The narrative of an Italian woman’s experiences after her spouse abruptly left her after fifteen years of marriage is compelling. Olga finds it increasingly challenging to maintain her previous standards of cleanliness, make meals with inventiveness and enthusiasm, and resist from using profanity now that she is responsible for two young children. She can’t even stop herself when she runs into her husband in the street with his much younger new lover. Olga describes her transition from denial to a heartbreaking emptiness. When she finds herself essentially confined to their high-rise flat, she is forced to face her ghosts, the possibility of losing her identity, and the thought that life may never be the same.
The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
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The narrator, Olga, found out that her husband was cheating on her, and he has since left her. She must face her suffering and the effects of his treachery on her, including how they changed her. And in the midst of it all, she has to take care of her kids. What needs to happen—a crucial encounter with her own self—is being trapped in her flat with nowhere to escape. Except for her own concern, there is nothing there. The children, the dejected dog, and the neighbour are among the other characters.
I find this to be a stunning, gritty, and disturbing novel. A woman’s struggles as she navigates the hot-cold empty space between who she was before her spouse betrayed and left her and who she will become after are clinically depicted by the author. Ferrante writes in a full-frontal, dead-serious style. Her first-person narrator is constantly at a sharp distance from her surroundings and herself, and she is very perceptive to sensory detail while being neither sensual nor emotional in her representation of it.
Surprisingly, this book’s ending is neither simple nor light, but it also isn’t dark. Despite her zeal, Ferrante is focused on a type of truth-telling that is becoming increasingly uncommon in a time when ideals and pictures of how women’s lives should be lived are bombarding them from all sides. Despite the fact that Ferrante’s characters are feminists, their experiences are recorded honestly. As I read, it struck me that Ferrante was doing something fresh, bringing to light in a manner that hasn’t been done before a female experience that is both understudied and common enough: being abandoned. Her books evoke the atmosphere of questioning in a small space with a single glaring light source.
