I once heard a lawyer with years of experience in family law
assert that everyone who gets divorced is crazy for at least a year afterwards.
By inviting us inside the head of her divorcing narrator, the pseudonymous
Italian writer Elena Ferrante lends support to that lawyer’s view in “The Days
of Abandonment,” the tenth book from Europa Editions and the third by this
writer that I’ve read so far in 2012.
Ferrante’s books are tough reads. Having “pre-read” this one
and discovered that some graphic and extreme unpleasantness was in the offing,
I was tempted to bag it and return it to the library.
But graphic and extreme unpleasantness can’t be a
dealbreaker if you’re going to read 21st century literary fiction.
I’m glad I didn’t succumb to my inclination, because Ferrante’s tale of the
thoughts and actions of 38-year-old Olga, the narrator, in the wake of her
husband’s leaving her for a mistress half his age and only just out of her
teens, blew me away, as Alice Sebold’s cover blurb promised.
“One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband
announced that he wanted to leave me,” Olga tells readers at the novel’s
outset. In the wake of that “it’s not you, it’s me” declaration, Olga describes
how behind her outward calm, “a wave of anguish and rage was growing that
frightened me,” particularly once she learns that there’s another much younger
woman behind her husband’s departure.
Her circumstances bring back the desperation and
deterioration of a similarly bereft neighbor from her childhood, “La
Poverella.” Olga remembers her mother and associates remarking “when you don’t
know how to keep a man you lose everything.” Like La Poverella, Olga tries to
hold it together and to get her husband back. Neither is within her power.
Olga’s unflinching description of even her most unflattering
thoughts and actions are part of what make Ferrante’s story so compelling.
Early on, in a flashback to her college days, Olga remembers “As a girl I had
liked obscene language, it gave me a sense of masculine freedom. Now I knew that
obscenity could raise sparks of madness if it came from a mouth as controlled
as mine.” And indeed it does: she gets into a riproaring fight with her
husband, and, with the children in the next room, lets him have it with both
barrels, as Marie
notes in her review. “Speak like what? I don't give a shit about
prissiness. You wounded me, you are destroying me, and I'm supposed to speak
like a good, well-brought-up wife?…What words am I supposed to use for what
you’ve done to me, for what you’re doing to me?…Let’s talk about it!…[I]n order
not to disturb the gentleman, not to disturb his children,, I’m supposed to use
clean language, I’m supposed to be refined, I’m supposed to be elegant!….”
Describing her descent into deep, self-destructive
depression, Olga muses “What was I? A woman worn out by four months of tension
and grief.” When a series of unrelated and grim crises hit at once, she
realizes she must pull herself together, but she has such difficulty in doing
so that she gives her preteen daughter a sharp paper cutter and instructs her
to prick her with it if she perceives that her mother is becoming “distracted.”
Confused and repulsed, the child asks how she will know whether Olga needs a
prick. Olga responds, “A distracted person is a person who no longer smells
odors, doesn’t hear words, doesn’t feel anything.”
Her daughter does have to prick her, the crises get
resolved—though not all happily—and Olga begins her climb out of depression and
back to normal life. Throughout Ferrante’s taut storytelling, we feel Olga’s
emotional and even physical pain. Even in translation, Ferrante makes every
word in every sentence count, and I’m looking forward to reading “My
Brilliant Friend,” her newly published Europa novel.
