The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante

        [Editor’s note: I actually missed the Ferrante book club, so oops.] Three months ago, I read The Wall by Marlen Haushofer as a book club novel for Type in Toronto. In the latest installment of book club, we’re taking a look at The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante, another book where a woman is blindsided into isolation and must care for dependents with an increasing level of frustration. It seems that Type has a type. But I’m underselling it for comedic effect. The Days of Abandonment is a challenging, existential work about relationships, responsibilities, and selfhood. 

The book opens with Olga’s husband leaving her, seemingly spontaneously, after years of marriage. This sends Olga into a spiral of obsession and rage, especially when she discovers that her husband has left her for an inappropriately younger woman. She engages in rash behaviours, all the while fearing that she is descending into a misanthropic trope she witnessed in her childhood: the poverella, who was similarly abandoned and similarly acted erratically. Now that she is in a similar position, Olga finds herself unable but to attack her husband when she sees him in public and engage in a sordid and failed sexual encounter with her neighbour, whom she hates. Meanwhile, her dog and her son are incredibly sick, much to her annoyance, and her daughter offers her intense judgment while she dissociates to the point of needing her daughter to stab her to bring her back to reality. The group of them gets locked in their apartment and the book spirals into a frenetic madness. 

Plot-wise, the book is pretty thin. Depth-wise, it’s incredibly rich. It’s a finely wrought exploration of the psychological dynamics of identity, relationships, time, and existence. I ended up documenting a number of passages from the text, and, admittedly, I’m about as chaotic in my notetaking as Ferrante’s narrator is in her actions.

The initial pull of the book is the secrecy in which the abandonment is shrouded. There is a history of her husband trying to end the relationship and so Olga has a level of doubt that he may return. Upon reflecting about a previous attempt for him to end the relationship, she notes, “five days later he telephoned me in embarrassment, justified himself, said that there had come upon him a sudden absence of sense” (10), and says that “the phrase made an impression” about lingered with her. The question of whether he will come back lingers and, as she gets into increasingly desperate attempts to get in touch with him, it builds towards the conversation of whether there’s another woman. He says there is, but for a reader, I found there was that little bit of doubt: is he lying about a paramour because it’s the easiest way to make a clean break?

Of course, it is eventually confirmed that Mario is indeed seeing another woman and is not coming back. Olga gets more paranoiac, more obsessive. It’s uncomfortable to observe, but the book challenges its readers by presenting a feminine version of the male messiness at which nobody blinks. The vulgarity of her speech, the crassness of her comments, the repetitiousness in her thought patterns are all recognizable—in someone like Henry Miller. Olga notes that as a girl she “had liked obscene language, it gave [her] a sense of masculine freedom” (22). She continues, “Now I knew that obscenity could raise sparks of madness if it came from a mouth as controlled as mine” (22).

Indeed, Ferrante’s novel offers a kind of metacommentary on the literary history of the rejected woman. Her narrator describes being given a book and reading it, “But when [she] gave her back the volume, [she] made an arrogant statement: these women are stupid. Cultured women, in comfortable circumstances, they broke like knick-knacks in the hands of their straying men. They seemed sentimental fools” (21). Olga’s narration continues, “I wanted to be different, I wanted to write stories about women with resources, women of invincible stories about women with resources, women of invincible words, not a manual for the abandoned wife with her lost love at the top of her thoughts” (21). Her writing philosophy opens the door for the very messiness (that is, complexity) of human emotion: “I had pretensions. I didn’t like the impenetrable page, like a lowered blind. I liked light, air between the slats. I wanted to write stories full of breezes, of filtered rays where dust motes danced. And then I loved the writers who made you look through every line, to gaze downward and feel the vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno” (21). When childhood Olga tells her teacher that, her reaction suggests that she lost someone and it is only twenty years later that she suspects the same thing is happening to her. The passage continues with repetitive disbelief: how could Mario leave? How could he “become uninterested in [her] life, like a plant watered for years that is abruptly allowed to die of drought” (21). 

Olga obsesses over the past. Now that her marriage has collapsed, she sees herself in her distraught elementary school teacher; she sees herself in the poverella; she sees herself in the novel she had so abhorred: “Of that book from my adolescence the few sentences I had memorized at the time came to mind: I am clean I am true I am playing with my cards on the table” (22). She reflects, though, that “those were affirmations of derailment” (22). Again, Ferrante offers a hint to the style of obsessive rejection: “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” (22). There are several other moments in the text in which she recalls the need for commas, the lack of which point towards her increasing deterioration (“Hold the commas, hold the periods. It’s not easy to go from the happy serenity of a romantic stroll to the chaos, to the incoherence of the world” (70)).

Throughout the entire book, there’s a divide between what Olga rationally knows against the unfathomability of being left. On the one hand, she admits, “I was ashamed of myself” (34) while on the other she “couldn’t do anything about it” (34). Her desperation leads to a self-destructiveness, hoping that in performing her inability to exist without Mario that it will lure him back. She notes, “I couldn’t think of anything except how to get him back I soon developed an obsession to see him, tell him what I could no longer manage, show him how diminished I was without him” (34). It’s a psychologically complex response in which she attempts to align their different conceptions of reality: “I was sure that, stricken by a kind of blindness, he had lost the capacity to place me and the children in our true situation and imagined that we continued to live as we always had, peacefully. Maybe he even thought we were a little relieved, because finally I didn’t have to worry about him, and the children didn’t have to fear his authority, and so Gianni was no longer reprimanded if he hit Ilaria and Illaria was no longer reprimanded if she tormented her brother, and we all lived—we on one side, he on the other—happily” (34-35). She wants to try to force Mario’s perception, which is such a limited point of view and yet feels completely plausible in the context of loss: “I hoped that if he could see us, if he knew about the state of the house, if he could follow for a single day our life as it had become—disorderly, anxious, taut as a wire digging into the flesh—if he could read my letters and understand the serious work I was doing to sort out the breakdown of our relationship, he would immediately be persuaded to return to his family” (35).

At this point, you may be noticing how much of Ferrante’s text is being reproduced here in full. There are a few reasons for that. First, I think that Ferrante’s prose is compelling since it so accurately captures the desperation of her character. The skewed logic, the lapse in clear-thinking (which harkens back to what Mario had said to her). The other reason I want to replicate Ferrante’s words faithfully here is because the excess in Olga’s speech is, I think, critical to the work.

I mentioned Olga’s parallel to her husband. Mario claims a “sudden absence of sense” (10). That becomes an underlying apothegm for the novel. She has lost her sense and the novel offers a glorious conclusion to the throughline. When Olga is able to meet her husband on a level playing field, she admits that she no longer loves him. He makes some assumptions, which Olga then corrects: “I don’t love you anymore because, to justify yourself, you said that you had fallen into a void, an absence of sense, and it wasn’t true” (185). When her husband says it was true, she again corrects him: “No. Now I know what an absence of sense is and what happens if you manage to get back to the surface from it. You, you don’t know. At most you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole with Carla’s body” (185). I love the way these lines simultaneously offer a visceral response (“plugged up the hole with Carla’s body”) and an existential one. She confronts the depths of her own sorrow and disassociation from herself head-on, leaning into the isolation rather than trying to overcome her loneliness with other men—although there is one scene, where…well…

But more importantly, the novel confronts the relationship of Olga—and women in general—to time. Again, it becomes a kind of inversion between Mario and Olga. She remembers a conversation they had and narrates it as follows:

I don’t know exactly what he said. If I have to be honest, I think that he mentioned only the fact that, when you live with someone, sleep in the same bed, the body of the other becomes like a clock, ‘a meter,’ he said—he used just that expression—‘a meter of life, which runs along leaving a wake of anguish.’ But I had the impression that he wanted to say something else, certainly I understood more than what he actually said, and with an increasing, calculated vulgarity that first he tried to repress and which then silenced him I hissed:

‘You mean that I brought you anguish? You mean that sleeping with me you felt yourself growing old? You measured death by my ass, by how once it was firm and what it is now? Is that what you mean?’ (40)

Ferrante illustrates the way women embody time. I’ve seen a number of novels and philosophers which suggest that women have a deeper connection to time (whether it be through the notion of a ‘biological clock’ or something more metaphysical). But the way that Ferrante offers such a scathing critique of the hypocrisy of male midlife crises is so compelling here. This is particularly so because in the pages that follow, Olga follows her husband with “a million recriminations” in her mind. The actual objection she raises, though, is about how she provided him time; she created time. While the argument has been trod before, Ferrante does so in a particularly compelling way. She narrates, “I wanted to cry: don’t touch anything; they are things you worked on while I was there, I was taking care of you, I was doing the shopping, the cooking, it’s time that belongs to me in a way, leave everything there. But now I was frightened of the consequences of every word I had uttered, of those that I could utter, I was afraid I had disgusted him, that he would go away for good” (42). Again, there’s the tension between the righteous critique of her husband and the desperate fear of losing him for all time.

In many ways, The Days of Abandonment is a book about self-sacrifice, of losing oneself to others, and how women are especially subject to such demands. Continuing on with the discussion of time, Olga elaborates:

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. And now, now he had left me, carrying off, abruptly, all that time, all that energy, all that effort I had given him, to enjoy its fruits with someone else, a stranger who had not lifted a finger to bear him and rear him and make him become what he had become. It seemed to me an action so unjust, a behaviour so offensive that I couldn’t believe it, and sometimes I thought his mind had been obscured, he had lost the memory of us, was helpless and at risk, and it seemed to me that I loved him as I had never loved him, with anxiety rather than with passion, and I thought he had a pressing need for me. (63)

I love that passage. The personification of time—or rather its becoming material—-is particularly effective. The way Olga equates her gestures into quantifiable, measurable units, makes the impact felt that much more powerfully. The latter half of the passage provides a more refined discussion around types of love.

Olga demonstrates love in many ways to her other dependents, albeit with frustration and increasing dissociation. She hates their dog, for example: “Stupid dog, stupid dog, whom Mario had given as a puppy to Gianni and Ilaria, who had grown up in our house, had become an affectionate creature—but really he was a gift from my husband to himself” (54). She critiques Mario for his selfishness, since he “had dreamed of a dog like that since he was a child, not something wished for by Gianni and Ilaria, spoiled dog, dog that always got its way” (54). There are a number of moments where Olga abuses the dog, alternatingly being obliged to care for it.

Indeed, the dog becomes a symbol of Ogla’s obligations. Partway through the novel, Olga gets trapped in the apartment with her children and the dog, Otto. They are accidentally locked in and Olga cannot get the key to work. The obligations pile up and cause her to spiral into the self-destructiveness that she had formerly tried to portray to Mario—now, unseen by anyone else, she lives out her own prophecy. Problem after problem emerges. The dog gets sick. The son gets sick. There are ants: “they ran in a line along the base of the bookcase, they had returned to besiege the house” (126). With the ants in particular, Ferrante offers an interesting suggestion. The ants are described as “perhaps [...] the only black thread that held [the apartment] together, that kept it from disintegrating completely” (126). The notion that this flaw is precisely what grounds the apartment in reality for Olga is indeed reflective of the bigger picture: without her wards, Olga would fall apart completely. As for the ants,

without their obstinancy [...] Ilaria would now be on a splinter of floor much farther away that she seems and the room where Gianni is lying would be harder to reach than a castle whose drawbridge has been raised, and the room of pain where Otto is in agony would be a leper colony, and impenetrable, and my very emotions and thoughts and memories of the past, foreign places and the city of my birth and the table under which I listened to my mother’s stories, would be a speck of dust in the burning light of August. Leave the ants in peace. Maybe they weren’t an enemy, I had been wrong to try to exterminate them. At times the solidity of things is entrusted to irritating elements that appear to disrupt their cohesion” (126).

That final line seems to serve as a key to the text as a whole. Fissures are what reflect reality, what draw Olga back—as I mentioned, Olga gets her daughter Ilaria to stab her when she starts to lose focus while trying to tend to all of the issues she’s facing.

One of those issues is her disassociation from herself. Her loss of self manifests in various ways throughout the novel. In one gruelling encounter, she tries to give herself to her neighbour in one of the most (intentionally) awkward sexual encounters I’ve read in a novel. At first, Olga disassociates from herself using her body, but later uses her body to return to herself. All the while, she “thought of beauty as a constant effort to eliminate corporeality” (97). She describes how she “wanted him to love [her] body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty. [She] thought anxiously. Is this forgetfulness. Or maybe not” (97). She blames her mother for “the obsessive bodily attention of women” and describes a moment of connection when a young office mate of hers “farted without embarrassment and, with laughing eyes, gave [her] a half smile of complicity” (97). Again, we are psychologically contradictory. On the one hand, she wants to eliminate her corporeality. By the same token, it is her corporeality that allows her to connect with herself and others. In a pivotal moment, she describes taking off makeup and seeing herself in a triptych-style mirror. She sees “the two halves of [her] face separately, far apart, and [she] was drawn first by [her] right profile, then by the left” (123). The fragmentary nature of her reflection renders all angles of her unfamiliar to herself. She then rearranges the mirrors to see herself differently and remarks, “there is no technical means of reproduction that, up to now, has managed to surpass the mirror and the dream” (123). While using a mirror as symbolism for a fragmented identity is a little trite, Ferrante still renders the scene compelling. Two of the three reflections speak against Olga and “over those two half portions, Olga had scant control, she was not very resistant, not very persistent” (123). There is “the worse side, the better side, geometry of the hidden” (123). She continues, “If I had lived in the belief that I was the frontal Olga, others had always attributed to me the shifting, uncertain welding of the two profiles, an inclusive image that I knew nothing about” (123). She reflects on which version of herself she thought she was giving others and who others received.

I really like the way Ferrante explores the question of how we see one another. At one point, her daughter makes a statement about how Olga hits the children. Olga objects: “I didn’t hit them, I had never done it, at most I had threatened to do it” (102). She thinks, though, that “maybe for children there’s no difference between what one threatens and what one really does” (102). She continues, “the words immediately made the future real, and the wound of the punishment still burned even when I no longer remembered the fault that I would or could have committed” (102). She remembers her mother threatening to cut off her hands, “and those words were a pair of long, burnished steel scissors that came out of her mouth, jawlike blades that closed over the wrists, leaving stumps sewed up with a needle and thread from her spools” (102-103). Nonetheless, she tries to explain to her daughter that she never hit her and at most said she would slap her, but realizes “there’s no difference [...] and hearing that thought in [her] head scared [her]” (103). The difference between reality and our perception erodes and Olga “ended up in an alluvial flow that eliminated boundaries” (103). Again, the bodily is what comes to matter most: “The word ‘slap’ is not this slap” (103). Olga then slaps her daughter to prove the point. It’s chilling.

Later, when Ilaria puts on makeup, Olga is disturbed by her imitator: “What did it mean, we were identical, at that moment I needed to be identical only to myself” (121). She is nauseated by the experience and “Everything began to break down again” (121). Olga starts to wonder, “Maybe [...] Ilaria herself wasn’t Ilaria” (121). Again, Olga refers back to stories from her past—The Vomero and the poverella. She wonders if they have somehow transcended time and are actually these figures from the past, feeling, “without realizing it, I had been transformed into one of them, a figure of childish fantasies, and now Ilaria as only returning to me my true image, she had tried to resemble me by making herself up like me” (121). Olga enters the abyss. Her lapse of sense is characterized as follows:

This was the reality that I was about to discover, behind the appearance of so many years. I was already no longer I, I was someone else, as I had feared since waking up, as I had feared since who knows when. Now any resistance was useless, I was lost just as I was laboring with all my strength not to lose myself, I was no longer there, at the entrance to my house, in front of the reinforced door, coming to grips with that disobedient key. I was only pretending to be there, as in a child’s game. (121)

I’m rambling. I’m giving away the best parts and existential reflections. At the same time, I’ve withheld a number of scenes. The actual beats in the plot have been wildly underreported. One of the things I’ve hardly mentioned is the sordid affair she has with her neighbour, which leads to a number of reflections on sex and connection. She hates him, he hates her dog, she hates her dog, she needs him to help save her dog, and—when they can’t—to bury it. There’s a moment too when she thinks she sees her dog: “it seemed to me that the shade of Otto had joyously crossed the scene like a dark vein through bright, living flesh, I wasn’t frightened. The whole future—I thought—will be that way, life lives together with the damp odor of the land of the dead attention with inattention, passionate leaps of the heart along with abrupt losses of meaning. But it wouldn’t be worse than the past” (176).

Returning for a moment to the topic of sex, I’ll offer one passage that reflects the crassness that Olga reclaims it with justified feminine rage:

we consummate life and lose it because in some long-ago time someone, in the desire to unload his cock inside us, was nice, chose us among women [...] “we take for some sort of kindness addressed to us alone the banal desire for sex. We love his desire to fuck, we are so dazzled by it we think it’s the desire to fuck only us, us alone. Oh yes, he who is so special and who has recognized us as special. We give it a name, that desire of the cock, we personalize it, we call it my love. To hell with all that, that dazzlement, that unfounded titillation. Once he fucked me, now he fucks someone else, what claim do I have? Time passes, one goes, another arrives. I was about to swallow some pills, I wanted to sleep lying in the darkest depths of myself. (74).

Throughout the book, Ferrante offers perceptive insight into our internal storms. Whether it’s about the bodily or conceptions of self or time or relationships, there is a dark undercurrent that makes us question how we ought to live. The fissures seem to guide Olga’s way and when everything is going poorly she relies on the mantra “I love my husband and so all this has meaning” (88). She repeats that sentence as she falls asleep—of course, there’s some irony there which begs the question of—when she no longer loves her husband, does this journey then have no meaning?

As you can see, there is a lot to talk about for The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante. I have barely scratched the surface and worry about over-citing the book and offering very little commentary. It’s a shame I wasn’t able to make it to the book club, because I would love to have heard what others had to say about this descent—this true descent, not Mario’s superficial crisis.

Happy reading!