[831] The Days of Abandonment – Elena Ferrante

“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 in him.” (Ch.31, 140)

The Days of Abandonment (Il Divorcio) is the raw, ferocious depiction of one woman, Olga, and her descent into disarray after her husband of fifteen years suddenly announces that he is leaving her because he is confused and unhappy. He manipulates Olga to call the shot of their separation. After he leaves, Olga has to care for the two children in addition to housework. She would sit in her increasingly disorderly home, writing letters to Mario and trying to identify the moment when her marriage ceased to be the mature partnership that she’d always thought it to be.

… and I don’t know what physiognomy he had attributed to me, what montage of me had made him fall in love, what, on the other hand, had turned out to be repugnant to him, making him fall out of love. (Ch.26, 124)

What makes the book so powerful is the voice, first-person, caught in space between telling a story and explaining, justifying to herself what had happened to her marriage. Reader gets inside Olga’s head, witnesses her erratic thoughts, her dangerous motives, her hallucinations, her rage, her pain and her desperation. This is when the book sometimes get too difficult and muddy. She plunges into this vertigo where she cannot help lash at society and turn cynical and sarcastic, and withdraw her trust in people. She’s in a purgatory of rage and bereavement.

Without herself knowing, she has taken absence of her sense and lapsed into a momentary loss of sanity. But it’s almost as if this trip to hell and back is necessary and conducive to the healing. She’s making decisions that have sure consequences. She’s in self-scrutiny but also self-denial. Between reason, insanity and survival, she continues to live. It reads like a monologue of someone thrives to fight, who might have taken absence of sense but never an absence of morality.

187 pp. Europa Editions. Trade Paper. [Read|Skim|Toss] [Buy|Borrow]