Elena Ferrante

Ann Goldstein

The Days of Abandonment

I Giorni Dell'abbandono

Erika Monti 

“Cancella i punti esclamativi. Lui è andato, tu resti. Non godrai più del lampo dei suoi occhi, delle parole, ma con questo? Organizza le difese, conserva la tua interezza, non farti rompere come un soprammobile, non sei un ninnolo, nessuna donna è un ninnolo. La femme rompue, ah, rompue, rotta un cazzo. Il mio compito, pensavo, è dimostrare che si può restare sane. Dimostrarlo a me, a nessun altro. Se sono esposta ai ramarri, combatterò i ramarri. Se sono esposta alle formiche, combatterò le formiche. Se sono esposta ai ladri, combatterò i ladri. Se sono esposta a me stessa, mi combatterò.”

“Non ero la donna che è fatta a brani dai colpi dell’abbandono e dell’assenza, fino a impazzire, fino a morirne. Solo poche schegge mi erano schizzate via, per il resto stavo bene. Integra ero, integra sarei rimasta. A chi mi fa del male, reagisco restituendo la pariglia. Io sono l’otto di spada, io sono la vespa che punge, io sono la serpe scura. Io sono l’animale invulnerabile che attraversa il fuoco e non si brucia.”

soochie

“I am clean I am true I am playing with my cards on the table. No, I said to myself, those were affirmations of derailment. To begin with, I had better remember, always put in the commas. A person who utters such words has already crossed the line, feels the need for self-exaltation and therefore approaches confusion …

As a girl I had liked obscene language, it gave me a sense of masculine freedom. Now I knew that obscenity could raise sparks of madness if it came from a mouth as controlled as mine.”

This book is about the reflection of a thirty year old mother after her opportunist of a husband of fifteen years abruptly leaves her for a woman half his age. I discovered this book through a random Booktuber and I had to fight back tears because I read this at school. It explores the trauma of betrayal, deception and of course the subsequent numbness, even manic, experience of trying to keep oneself in control in situations that fell and continued to fall apart – especially for a mother of two. The writing feels sincere that every now and then, I would stop because of the anger and sadness that welled up within me for the character. It gave me insight on this part of motherhood that involved co-existing with someone that broke your trust through civil arrangement, where pride goes to the side for the betterment of others and of yourself. It's discovering the way that perhaps I too, could not see the pain in my mother as she tries her damnest to stay afloat.

Side note: I wish she continued to beat her ex longer.

Ms Shane

This book is about the reflection of a thirty year old mother after her opportunist of a husband of fifteen years abruptly leaves her for a woman half his age. I discovered this book through a random Booktuber and I had to fight back tears because I read this at school. It explores the trauma of betrayal, deception and of course the subsequent numbness, even manic, experience of trying to keep oneself in control in situations that fell and continued to fall apart – especially for a mother of two. The writing feels sincere that every now and then, I would stop because of the anger and sadness that welled up within me for the character. It gave me insight on this part of motherhood that involved co-existing with someone that broke your trust through civil arrangement, where pride goes to the side for the betterment of others and of yourself. It's discovering the way that perhaps I too, could not see the pain in my mother as she tries her damnest to stay afloat.

Side note: I wish she continued to beat her ex longer.

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.

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.

Gemma

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...

Maria

"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.

JoAnna

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.

Cody Degen

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

Zoe Stricker

tina

Eri Asahi

** 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!!!

Lia Yuliana

Update 19/07/2022

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Official Release Date : September 1st 2005
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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.”

The Days of Abandonment

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