The Days of Abandonment

Oh, Elena Ferrante, how do you understand women so well? No one else can get into the head of a woman and make you co-live her experience like Ferrante.

My favourite bit, undoubtedly, was Olga hitting rock bottom. Ferrante manages to convey that feeling of sleepwalking, of confusion and one's own divorce from reality that comes with psychologically scarring events in our lives. There was something horrifying to see the way Olga acts and yet be entirely immersed into her experience; her lack of lucidity becoming the reader's own.

Molto ripetitivo, ma riesce a non annoiare grazie alla scrittura fluida e accattivante.

this was such a wild ride, initially i loved it for its raw and emotional portrays of a woman being abandoned by her cheating husband, but at some point the feelings cause by abandonment such as loneliness, anger, isolation, mania, obsession, quickly turned into a horror story, i still really liked it but found the later development of the story line unnecessarily distorted and excessive, also imo the ending doesn't seem to fit or do justice to either the plot or the characters...

"What was I? A woman worn out by four months of tension and grief; not, surely, a witch who, out of desperation, secretes a poison that can give a fever to her male child, kill a domestic animal, put a telephone line out of order, ruin the mechanism of a reinforced door lock." yeah this was good. i doubted it for the first half, mainly because i felt like i was in no way the target audience, that maybe i would appreciate this better if i had any of our narrator's - olga's - lived experiences, if i was older, married or had children. but i was wrong. as soon as olga reaches her breaking point, or the "absence of sense" as she puts it, the book opens up in remarkable ways. ferrante definitely has themes and subjects that are repeated regularly in her work (or what i've read of it), but she manages to ascribe them new meaning, turning them inside out in different ways. the entire episode when gianni is sick, the dog is poisoned, olga is losing sense of herself, and they discover they are locked in felt nauseating, i felt like i was there with them, experiencing the same anxiety, the same absence of my sense of self. i loved in this chapters little details added to prove this unmaking of the self, with olga starting to refer to herself in third person, no longer narrating in first person. as with the neapolitan series, i think the days of abandonment has a very banal premise - olga's husband, mario, leaves her for another woman, and as she struggles to make sense of this new life, olga feels that she is losing sense of reality, and falls into a sort of abyss. however, i feel that despite the banality of the premise, it is olga's rich inner life - her need to make sense of what is happening to her, who she is in this new context, destroy herself and everything around her, then put herself back together - that make the book so fascinating to me. i still feel, overall, that i might appreciate this better in ten years time, but it was really good. i was afraid to start another ferrante book after how much i loved the neapolitan series, mainly in fear that it wouldn't live up to those books (and it doesn't, really, but it's also a much shorter, more pointed book) or that i would feel the need to constantly compare them - which didn't happen.

Elena Ferrante is amazing. Her sentences are incredibly dense and emotive and took more time to read, but were well worth the effort. I don’t have words right now. She’s a shapeshifter at transforming situations, moods, ambiances. I couldn’t read this book at night at first because the pervasive sense of loneliness she creates is so damn tangible that I was afraid I wouldn’t be able to sleep.

4+ It feels wrong to give this book less than a 5 but it was too intense? Idk if it’s the saddest book I’ve ever read but it’s the most relentlessly bleak. Probably one of two books I’ve ever had to put down because it was eliciting too strong a reaction

Ferrante is always exceptional

3.5 stars

** spoiler alert ** Oh my god! I started reading this without expecting anything but holy mother mary... should’ve paid more attention to the title! The way Elena Ferrante deliver the emotions, the feeling of being abandoned... everything’s VIVID in my mind. The book gently nudge more unpacked familiar packages that have been sitting hidden in the deepest hole of my mind to the surface and i had no choice but open and process them. I WOULD REALLY love to get my hand on the printed version. Oh god oh god what a pleasant experience!!!

Update 19/07/2022 You can find the rest of my reviews at An Ode to Fiction. | Subscribe to my Booktube channel Official Release Date : September 1st 2005 Buy the book : Amazon|Book Depository|Bookshop.org (affiliate) 4/5 ⭐️ “Yes, I was stupid. The channels of my senses were blocked, how long had it been since life flowed in them. What a mistake it had been to close off the meaning of my existence in the rites that Mario offered with cautious conjugal rapture. What a mistake it had been to entrust the sense of myself to his gratifications, his enthusiasms, to the ever more productive course of his life. What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn’t live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive with him.” This book is a good introduction to Elena Ferrante for me. The first chapter captured me, the rest just flows so easily that I quickly devoured this book. It took me two sittings but during those two sittings, reading this book, it ignited in me the melancholic desire to read more stories like this. Such a simple premise but explored, written, and described from all angles. If writing could have dimensions Elena Ferrante made it possible to write a book with four dimensions. The way Ferrante uses words is master class and skillful beyond comprehension. Truly astounding. “I looked at him attentively. It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn’t even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.”

One line review: 'Write hard and clear about what hurts.' - Ernest Hemingway