The Days Of Abandonment Review

On motherhood and the woman coming undone

I read Elena Ferrante for the first time last year in August as my Women In Translation month pick. I chose The Lost Daughter then, even though I'd already seen Maggie Gyllenhall's wonderful adaption, starring Oscar winner Olivia Colman (who I adore), and knew at the end of reading it that I'd be choosing her again in August the following year. Chronically online readers interested in bookish news must have seen a spike in Ferrante's name all over the internet the past few months as she recently topped the New York Times' 100 Greatest Books of the 21st Century list with her novel My Brilliant Friend, the first in a series of four books. But instead of the number one novel, I went with one of her solo works, which also made an appearance towards the bottom of the list, and throughout the reading experience, I was constantly reminded of a recurring line from Sigrid Nunez's What Are You Going Through: "That kind of woman's story."

Originally written and published in the Italian in 2002 (published in English in 2005) Elena Ferrante's second novel, The Days of Abandonment, opens with one of the sharpest sentences I've ever read in fiction: "One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me." The narrator, Olga, and her husband, Mario, have been married for fifteen years, they have two children, she is nearing forty, and her entire life has always revolved around her husband and their children. After he makes this announcement to her in the kitchen, their children in the other room, he leaves, turning her to stone beside the sink as she describes. This is a story that chronicles one woman's life after her husband abandons her and her desire to continue existing, but simultaneously a remarkable character portrait of millions of women who have existed and are still existing today.

For a brief period after he leaves, Mario occasionally continues to visit the house in order to see his children and Olga continues to employ every tool she can think of to make him stay and convince him that he has made the wrong choice, while trying to make sense of his sudden decision to completely upbraid their lives. It is on one of those days that he finally confesses to her that he is indeed seeing another woman. For Olga, then, she realises that his desertion of her is total. It is final. Her situation forces her to recall a story from childhood she overheard from her mother about a known woman in their neighbourhood who similarly gets left by her husband for another woman and the deterioration of the woman right before her eyes. First, Olga describing her says: 

"The woman lost everything, even her name (perhaps it was Emilia), for everyone she became the “poverella,” that poor woman, when we spoke of her that was what we called her. The poverella was crying, the poverella was screaming, the poverella was suffering, torn to pieces by the absence of the sweaty red-haired man, and his perfidious green eyes."

Further describing her:

"Now she came down the stairs stiffly, her body withered. She lost the fullness of her bosom, of her hips, of her thighs, she lost her broad jovial face, her bright smile. She became transparent skin over bones, her eyes drowning in violet wells, her hands damp spider webs."

It is this woman, the poverella, whose story Olga recalls in the early days of her abandonment that Ferrante sets at the center of her novel as a counterpart to her narrator. Olga, eventually realizing the finality of Mario's decision and the futility of her attempts to keep him, is thrown into a state of disarray and begins to wrestle against herself in order to stop herself from ending up like the woman from her childhood (who we learn ends up drowning herself).

In the initial days of her abandonment, Olga reminds herself to hold together for the sake of her two children, Gianni and Ilaria; she tries to balance their care, as well as the care of their dog (which was really Mario's dog) and it increasingly becomes difficult as she has to manage it all alone, all the while obsessing over thoughts of her husband and woman he left her for, which she is unable not to let destabilize her from time to time, and by which Ferrante brilliantly captures the boundless human emotions that can be birthed by pain. By Olga's life, we are shown how in such cases with a husband leaving, the wife, although heartbroken, is unable to exist for too long as a heartbroken woman whose husband has just left her because she has to exist as a mother first; how there are little to no allowances for her to be the heartbroken woman.

But slowly, Olga's mental state deteriorates and her actions become flippant, sloppy; she constantly forgets whether she turned off the gas or not, she sometimes forgets to pick the children up from school, sleeping during the day because she is unable to sleep during the night. Once, the children return from school knocking the door over and over again with Olga sleeping inside. When she finally wakes up to open the door, her son, Gianni says," I thought you were dead." Ferrante does not write the woman who is instantly able to pick herself up, dust herself off, not because she is very rare, but because she is hardly real. 

Instead, Ferrante offers us a raw and unfiltered character, one who is all life and no fiction. How long can one hold oneself together in such a situation before completely giving up? Slowly, Olga begins to cracks, inching closer and closer to becoming the woman from her childhood; she spends days, weeks after Mario leaves  thinking up ways to get him back, hating him, hating herself, wondering what she did wrong to make him leave her. Her children are at the forefront of her thoughts, but even then she is unable to completely offer herself to them or at times even consider them. And they become increasingly unbearable to her because although she is the parent who stays, she is the one who has to bear the wrath of their anger and sadness.We see that it is not just the parent who stays in a separation that suffers, it is the mother who stays. Every time she fails to properly carry out a function their father used to carry out she is reminded of it by them. As with such stories, Ferrante seems to say, daddy gets to leave and mommy gets to pay for it. 

At one point Ilaria is crying out for her father, screaming, “I want Daddy, call Daddy,” and Olga tells her angrily, “Your father has left us. He’s gone to live in another place with another woman, we’re no use to him anymore.” And in that Olga feels more human to us because we see her as an individual independent of her role as their mother. Because we see her act in a way that would normally be regarded as selfish.

"It was summer by now, the schools were closed, I didn’t know what to do with the children. I dragged them around through the city, in the heat, petulant, willful, ready to blame me for everything, for the heat, for staying in the city, for no beach, no mountains."

In one of the  most distinct scenes of the novel Olga takes the children to the park and by the time they have exhausted all the possible games to play they get into an argument with here over their father, and she storms off away from them angry. But after a while, she turns back to call out to them, but they are gone. When she finds them hiding, and Ilaria says Gianni told them to hide, she tells him, "Look at me, you little fool: do that again and I’ll kill you!" I recall being taken aback for what felt like a second before remembering it was a line my own mother, in a fit of rage, had used with us alot growing up. And perhaps, it'd be considered an unbelievable thing to hear a mother say to a child, but Ferrante puts all the ugly into the novel, and it's all of it, the ugly, the nasty, the vile, the despicable that makes you empathize with Olga all the more.

"Gianni acted like an impudent young bull, I detested it, he was growing up foolish and presumptuous and aggressive, eager to shed his own blood or that of others in some uncivilized conflict, I couldn’t bear it anymore."

As the novel progresses, Olga's frustration with her children grows, and  Ferrante highlights the anger for the husband that is sometimes passed down to the children, but particularly a male child, as they are the clearest mirror image of their father. In the quote above, Olga is growing particularly frustrated with Gianni because she is unable to see him and not see Mario at the same time. She is unable to look upon her son and not see the man who left her, who shattered her and resent him for it for his father. But it's in this that Ferrante also captures the varying complexities of our emotional capabilities. She fills Olga with so many underlying humane qualities. Hence, Olga is unable to deny when she recognizes that the bottled up  contents of the effect of Mario leaving her is spilling unto her children. Once she identifies them as "blameless creatures" and acknowledges that they have no hand in what their father has done to her. 

"Now, at thirty-eight, I was reduced to nothing, I couldn’t even act as I thought I should. No work, no husband, numbed, blunted."

Earlier in the novel, we learn that Olga is a writer and had published a novel after having her first child. But she eventually gives this up because of Mario. It is the old familiar irony: the woman who sacrifices her passion for a man who'll end up sacrificing her. Olga in retrospect says: 

"I had stayed awake night after night making him repeat the obstruse material of his studies. I had taken away my own time and added it to his to make him more powerful. I had put aside my own aspirations to go along with his. At every crisis of despair I had set aside my own crises to comfort him. I had disappeared into his minutes, into his hours, so that he could concentrate. I had taken care of the house, I had taken care of the meals, I had taken care of the children, I had taken care of all the boring details of everyday life, while he stubbornly climbed the ladder up from our unprivileged beginnings."

With Olga, Ferrante reminds us of the many women who have been slighted by their husbands in this way after sacrificing their lives for them in the first place. And so we are further able to make sense of the extent to which she loses herself because how do you go on when a man you've given all your life to and all the joys of your life for just up and leaves? 

There is a very interesting difference in the tone of this novel to her later work, The Lost Daughter (my only reference since it's the only other one I've read). While the narrative voice in The Days of Abandonment is as compelling, and maybe even more, as in the aforementioned novel, there is so much more vulgarity here that it is almost staggering. It is one of the tools Ferrante uses to show the development of Olga's character; Olga who was always in control of not just herself and her emotions, but also her vocabulary. And this only heightens the brilliance of the potrait of the woman unraveling. The curse words increase as the novel moves, and sometimes, although warranted, they are still as shocking . And this shock is not a response to the vulgarity of the language, but rather in regards to how intense it feels. Here, Ferrante is more than a master of the "show don't tell device" but it is the subtlety in her execution that creates the impact. We can see woman before our eyes falling, and it's not just from what she does and what she says, but how she says what she says.

Although there are many high points in The Days of Abandonment, I found the most interesting to be Ferrante's use of the absent character. Mario, the husband, is the reason for the story we are being told, but as a present character,  he is barely in the novel. After he leaves, we get tidbits of him, but never for more than a few pages. Yet somehow, he is the character who makes the most impression on me emotionally. I was astounded by how much anger I felt towards a character who we got so little off. But upon reflection, I realise that Ferrante manages to slip him into every page, every sentence, because every page and every sentence is the woman who he has abandoned reflecting and so he is at the center of every reflection. Perhaps, this is why I detest him all the more. Olga, a potrait of the lives of women who have existed and still continue to. Mario, a potrait of all the husbands who leave and somehow still manage to get the story written about them.

The Lost Daughter, Ferrante's novel examining an unusual mother and the difficulties of motherhood, would arrive a few years later, but it is evident even here, in an earlier novel, that writing on motherhood and the female experience is where Ferrante is at the peak of her writing powers. Her passion for these subjects are undeniable, captured in her storytelling and her ability to create such deep empathy by shedding a fresh light on the universal experiences of many women. Here, she offers us an unflinching look at life, sad and unkind to women as it is. A triumph and an achievement in the art of the character potrait in literature, The Days of Abandonment is a brutal and painful account of a woman's refusal to surrender herself to the fate of many like women before her. To defy the expected end which, as Sigrid Nunez puts it, is that kind of woman's story.