Reviews for The Days of Abandonment

The average rating for The Days of Abandonment based on 2 reviews is 2.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2014-09-20 00:00:00 Kate Keys What happens when a person's domestic life with spouse and children, their entire personal existence, cracks like a bottle of wine and spills all over the floor? The Days of Abandonment happens. The atmosphere of this book is far more powerful than the sum of each of its words. The shape of the telling fits the theme perfectly, and the honesty of Olga, the narrator, allows the reader to share in her experience, to look through every line, to gaze downward and feel the vertigo of the depths, the blackness of inferno. While Olga's voice is always painfully honest, I am clean I am true I am playing with my cards on the table, what really strikes the reader is how the language of the narration changes as Olga's state of mind changes. In the beginning, the writing is slow, thoughtful, quiet, with all the necessary commas and periods. I had taught myself to wait patiently until every emotion imploded and could come out in a tone of calm, my voice held back in my throat so that I could not make a spectacle of myself As Olga begins to slip beneath the skin of her life, as she folds back her own flesh to reveal her raw and vulnerable centre, the language becomes raw, bleeding, piercing, hold the commas, hold the periods this is abandonment She, we, cannot survive like this, we think. Everyone needs a skin to protect them, and we read on faster, suffering alongside her, willing her to draw her edges together and sew them up with one of her mother's darning needles so that we can feel comfortable and quiet again. And Olga does move beyond that initial raw phase, and the language follows suit, reflecting her new state of mind. As she begins to weigh up the cost of the years of marriage, what she has given, what has been taken from her, what she has renounced, what she is left with, her voice has a dangerous calm to it. She speaks of cutting, of excising the past, I wanted to cut myself to pieces, and we read on, one hand covering our eyes even as we strain to take in every word, because in this book, every word counts, every word performs. Olga's story is not new but this is an original telling of it. Ferrante is unafraid. She is unafraid of confronting feelings, of calling things by their real names. The term 'abandonment' is interesting. It gives two messages so I looked to see what the title was in the original Italian. It's called I giorni dell'abbandono, literally the days of abandonment and I wondered if in Italian the word abbandono means as much as it does in English, not only abandoning of spouse, children, pets but also abandoning of inhibitions, abandoning of hope. The blurbs from the Italian Press given on the Goodreads page for this book mention only the first sense, being abandoned by the spouse but I suspect Ferrante has chosen her title well. 'Abandonment' is not a word that many of us might use easily when speaking of the break-up of a family. We might prefer to talk of a spouse having left the family home; we might prefer to think of the one remaining behind keeping his/her dignity; we might expect that the children would become the priority; we might see the one left behind holding everything together, children, home, work, yes, even finding time to walk the family pet. Ferrante says that this is not the way it really happens, that something always has to give. In her version, that something is Olga's centre: it doesn't hold. In her version, pain is not hidden behind a brave face: it shrieks to the heavens. In her version, it is inevitable that there will be an absence of sense, that there will be abandonment of normal living. Ferrante's book is essentially something you feel more than you actually read and that's why her writing reminds me of Frida Kahlo's paintings. This one for example: The absent husband, the large white figure in overalls, still has a firm grip on the wife; her arms are cut off so that she can no longer hold onto anything; her own career, her real self is reduced to a skeleton in the corner. And this song from Chavela Vargas gives an idea of the intensity of feeling in Ferrante's writing. The lyrics are simple but eloquent: I'm tired of crying with no hope I don't know whether to curse you or pray for you I'm afraid to look for you and find you Where my friends assured me you go There are times when I'd like to die And release myself from this suffering But my eyes will die without seeing yours And at dawn my love will be waiting for you again As for you, you are partying Black dove, black dove, where are you? You shouldn't play with my pride Since your affection should have been mine and no one else's. And even though I love you madly, don't come back I want to be free, live my life with someone I love God give me strength because I'm dying to go look for him Here is the song, sung by Vargas, accompanying a clip from the movie Frida with Selma Hayek.

Review # 2 was written on 2016-12-03 00:00:00 Daniel Salazar Oh dear! Basically the Neapolitan novels render this book completely obsolete. It's like a crude test drive for the character of Elena. Elena is called Olga in this novel and is the woman from hell. A kind of fantasy creation of how we might behave in our most self-indulgent, man-hating and self-pitying incarnation. Essentially she's an educated thirty eight woman who behaves like an adolescent crackhead. I could imagine Meryl Streep playing her in a film, except the film I saw would have been a comedy and Streep would have been brilliantly funny. And that's maybe the problem. This novel should have been a comedy - it realises this a couple of times and then it's very funny. But the tone and prose is so self-consciously pretentious and purple that I found myself laughing at the book rather than with it. Basically this is the story of a woman who is left by her husband for a much younger woman. It's a clichéd subject which again begs for some humour. Olga reacts in a clichéd manner - she falls apart - so clichéd that it might be funny if it wasn't so over-written and so awkwardly and unconvincingly philosophical. If Olga runs a bath you know the bath is going to overflow. If Olga lets her dog off the leash you know something bad is going to happen to the dog. In other words this is a novel of relentless melodrama. Except the high-minded self-indulgent prose rarely recognises the necessity of digging out the comedy in melodrama. For the most part it takes all its melodrama seriously. Here's an example of the vaporous philosophical claptrap this novel abounds in - "Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell." Banality dressed up as gravitas by purple prose. All in all I got the sense of a writer still trying to find her voice, still learning how to construct sentences even. In a nutshell I don't think this should ever have been published. It's disconcerting when you read an early novel by an author you've come to love and find it thoroughly mediocre, or worse. It happened to me with Anthony Doerr as well. You end up thinking maybe your original enthusiasm was misplaced. I'm not going to read any more of the early Ferrante novels.