Elena Ferrante: "The Days of Abandonment"

Continuing my catch-up with Ferrante. This is her second novel.

Olga is thirty-eight, married to Mario, lives in Turin, and has two young children, Ilaria and Gianni. “One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me.” There are the usual emotional reactions: anger, loathing of her husband, self-loathing, jealousy, despair. And she sees her life falling apart.

She struggles to hold on to reality, to look after the children, walk the dog, and pay the bills. One day, she sees her husband with Carla, his new lover, a girl of twenty whom her husband had tutored. She attacks her husband, and knocks him down in the street. At home, a myriad of problems confront her. There are ants all over the apartment; a child has a fever; the phone bill hasn’t been paid; the dog is sick; the lock on the front door doesn’t work; everything seems to go wrong. And, later, there are the problems of the relationships of her children with Carla—do they like her more than their mother?

The novel certainly provides a very convincing view of a mind that is coming apart, struggling between reason and insanity, at the limits of coherence and decency, a mind that is desperate to survive…but how?  A love-hate relationship develops with Carrano, a neighbor, a shy grey-haired professional musician, with whom Olga has an extraordinarily squalid sexual encounter, although later he seems to become the means by which, eventually, she may be able to survive.

It is clearly a literary achievement, but sneaking into one’s mind from time to time is the thought—why doesn’t she pull herself together? Get a grip?  But clearly that is the last thing one should actually say to her…