The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
The Days of Abandonment
by Elena Ferrante
Europa Editions, 2015 (originally published 2005)
ISBN: 978-1609452766
192 p.p.
Guardian of My Solitude: A Lyrical Review
I am not one for a bandwagon. Yet to read a shade of Grey or even a quidditch of Potter, I stand with Gertrude Stein who said “I like a view but I like to sit with my back turned to it.”
When I do touch hype I like to come at it from the side, indirectly, to see the truth but see it slant. So my first foray into Ferrante fever began with her stand-alone novels The Days of Abandonment, The Lost Daughter, and Troubling Love.
For those still somewhat out of certain literary loops, Elena Ferrante is the pseudonym of a mysterious Italian writer whose Neapolitan Novels have drawn considerable readership and acclaim in recent years, especially it seems this past summer.
The fourth book in the saga came out this September, eagerly anticipated by me and my friends, but if you’re unwilling to commit months to that fascinating account of female friendship I highly recommend The Days of Abandonment to start.
*
I turn to fiction mostly in deep summer or winter, when it gets too hot or too cold to be a body, especially a female body.
When I feel exposed or tightly wound and need another setting to escape to, nothing picks me up and drops me elsewhere quite like fiction. Not even poetry, with its plights and gripes. Not even genre-bending nonfiction, with which I’ve been obsessed for many years.
Of Ferrante's translated novels, not of the saga, the most inviting and engrossing is The Days of Abandonment. The sentences are the most lush, the syntax luscious. Knowing nothing about the Italian language or its Neapolitan dialect, I found the translation by Ann Goldstein as seamless as sophisticated English, natural but also clearly kept within the bounds of high literary grammar.
In fact, the bookseller I turned to for more Ferrante didn't even know it was translation, a testament to both its readability and the myopia with which we approach international literature.
As far as plot goes, Abandonment is no light read for passing summer ennui but better suited for the dwindling hours.
Nothing quite happens until everything goes wrong in one day, but the first line alone compelled me:
"One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me."
*
The truth is I've always loved and am always in the market for works of literature by and about the experience of being a woman.
Just last year I was wandering around 192 Books in Chelsea looking for such a thing. I considered Ferrante then but was put off by the cover, in this case a white blonde woman, in a white satin negligee, in a reclining pose surrounded by dark sheets, half her face obscured by her own arm.
But with enough recommendations from trusted readers I felt the time had come to abandon my judgments.
Abandonment delves into the psyche of a woman left by her husband at 38, her slow descent into the body's decay, the neglect of her children, and ultimately the abandonment of her fears and marital concessions.
The translation is crisp enough to accommodate a prose style as engaging and hypnotic as the idea of eternal love.
Still about 3 steps too young for it, I admit, I was seduced by the mind of a woman who stared into an abyss so many women characters have disappeared into—Anna Karenina, Kate Chopin's Edna Montellier, Emma Bovary.
At every turn I thought c'est moi, or there but for the grace of god, etc.
For years I've railed against these protagonists, typically composed by men, and still insist that a woman writer would ask herself what choice we're left with after love, or even during it.
In worshipping geniuses who write 'post-love', or beyond that line which is often a narrative ending—Chris Kraus, Dodie Bellamy, Eileen Myles, Maggie Nelson—I'm filling in my own canon of female interiority. There is a comfort, and a complimentary courage, in knowing that the void looks back at you and even feeds you after a fall. That we can burn but not be consumed by love.
*
Abandonment is in line with my canon—an instant classic, as they say, an honest account of a woman, Olga, hovering between life and death, freedom and responsibility, herself and the world.
I wonder too what it must mean that I identify so readily with married women, and to what extent are we conditioned from an unripe age to see ourselves as already married, or in some sense already having been.
Do young women have to abandon traditional notions of love and companionship in order to engage other identities?
What is a woman abandoned by a man?
"In those long hours I was the sentinel of grief, keeping watch along with a crowd of dead words."
*
It is no coincidence then that Ferrante's protagonist, Olga, is a writer, or had been a writer, before her own ambitions were subsumed into her husband's.
As much as it is a freedom to recover that identity after marriage, a certain kind of solitude finds her there, sits with her at the desk, in the writing.
There, images of a poor old woman from Olga's childhood haunt her, another woman abandoned, the poverella, an object of pity defined by her relationship to marriage. The poverella who killed herself over a mediocre man. The poverella unloved and unwanted in a culture that measures women by little else.
Olga has internalized it, learned from the way this old woman grieved—such that when Olga sits down to write the poverella meets her there.
Easier to abandon the memory, subsist on daily married life, than to look the poverella in the heart long enough to see yourself in it.
"I wanted the flat certainty of normal days, even though I knew all too well that a frenetic movement upward endured in my body, a darting, as if I had seen an ugly poisonous insect at the bottom of a hole and every part of me were still retreating, my arms and hands waving, feet kicking. I have to relearn—I said to myself—the tranquil pace of those who believe they know where they're going and why."
*
And then there’s this passage, the most honest account of heteronormative love I’ve ever read—
"Everything was so random. As a girl, I had fallen in love with Mario, but I could have fallen in love with anyone: a body to which we end up attributing who knows what meanings. A long passage of life together, and you think he's the only man you can be happy with, you credit him with countless critical virtues, and instead he's just a reed that emits sounds of falsehood, you don't know who he really is, he doesn't know himself. We are occasions. 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."
Cynical, sure, but I say a healthy crack in the eggshell firmament many women construct for themselves, or that has been constructed for us, to keep us tracing constellations in search of marital bliss, in lieu of personal ambitions, a life of adventure, a day focusing on our wants and needs.
*
And then too the matter of the body, the everyday of it, banal and beastly and absurd, the center stage of intimacy and also where anxieties erupt.
It’s unsexy to talk about sweat, stains, smells, as unsexy to read as it is to write, but god how liberating after all the fluff and satin we’re subjected to.
Only men know this freedom, I’ve only seen men be so proud of their farts, the size of their shits, the aim of their piss streams.
"From the moment I fell in love with Mario, I began to fear that he would be repelled by me. Wash the body, scent it, eliminate all unpleasant traces of physiology. To levitate. I wanted to detach myself from the earth, I wanted him to see me hovering on high, the way wholly good things do. I never left the bathroom until every bad smell had vanished, I turned on the taps so he wouldn't hear the rush of urine. I rubbed myself, curried myself, washed my hair every two days. I thought of beauty as of a constant effort to eliminate corporeality. I wanted him to love my body forgetful of what one knows of bodies. Beauty, I thought anxiously, is this forgetfulness.
Or maybe not. It was I who believed that his love needed that obsession of mine. Inappropriate, backward, my mother's fault, she had trained me in the obsessive bodily attentions of women..."
*
But if you’re lucky enough to be chosen and to choose one among others, if you circumvent your own neuroses at the same time as he, how do you not devote your hours to him, in intimacy and gratitude? And don’t you have to tear yourself away to get a little writing done, or steal away at an awkward hour, just to regain some composure in yourself? Just to maintain a little emblem of yourself? And if you’re out one day during a heavy rain can you trust him to tend to your things? To serve as extension of you and move your work away from the open window—because it is yours, or because it is his now too?
And then, after all, this shipwreck—
"We don't know anything about people, even those with whom we share everything."
We may not even know ourselves.
*
It’s summer when I live with my partner so everything snaps open in full view, flat and loud. My body is exposed, the heat makes my skin sticky and sometimes my underboob drips with sweat. I sit in my own stew smelling myself, taking regular showers, but the constant humidity makes me feel more married than I’ve ever felt in my life.
I write rarely and act lazy in this house, blame the break, blame the weather, blame the guilt, fear the guilt.
He’s supportive but wants my attention.
I’m attentive but recover myself in reading and writing.
I worry if I should make concessions this soon, I worry if I’ve abandoned my preferred way of life already, a life more solitary and more productive, less stable and more kinetic, more with women than one man.
Early love.
One day, after a hellish commute in a torrential downpour, I come home to a rained-on desk, my copy of The Days of Abandonment cradling a small pool of water.
As hideous as the cover is it’s made of tougher stuff and doesn’t bend to moisture, the drops slip off easily, no harm no foul.
I’m moved by the very basic gesture of cohabitation—him moving my things to the side, closing the window—and wonder if the book serves as a metaphor of sorts.
I look for signs of devotion everywhere, or on a gloomy day its opposite, with just as much commitment to one as the other.
Either way, I tell myself, I have to be fine. Relationships develop and unravel with the same dumb whims, anxiety on the up and on the down, compromise at both ends, in between.
With or without, my friends and I toasted after my last breakup.
Even now, with or without.
*
Because Mario sought a younger woman, Carla, after many years of marriage to Olga, because it’s such a common narrative, Ferrante takes this basic plotline and exposes it for what it is: fear of the body, disgust with the aging body, shame for the body as it decays.
It was Olga as embodiment of passing time that he turned away from, Olga as witness to his.
As is often the case Mario claimed it was an absence of sense that drove him to leave her, but by the end of the narrative she tells 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."
*
Perhaps it is that some women plug up that hole with their own, fretting over its sights and sounds in a losing battle. Perhaps we turn to domestica and pregnancy to help us cope, to test our limits just to see how far we can expand to fit the other before everything contracts.
And when our efforts for the day are done, my partner engrossed in a screen somewhere, my back turned to him, how important it is to sit with the poverellas dancing in our heads, give them a shape more dignified than the corpses our culture prefers them to be, turn toward that interiority, our mothers, our lovers, that pink-tinted void so many of us disappear into—
In these sweet hours I am the sentinel of both our solitudes, keeping watch along with an inheritance of living women.
“The point of marriage is not to create a quick commonality by tearing down all boundaries; on the contrary, a good marriage is one in which each partner appoints the other to be the guardian of his solitude, and thus they show each other the greatest possible trust. A merging of two people is an impossibility, and where it seems to exist, it is a hemming-in, a mutual consent that robs one party or both parties of their fullest freedom and development. But once the realization is accepted that even between the closest people infinite distances exist, a marvelous living side-by-side can grow up for them, if they succeed in loving the expanse between them, which gives them the possibility of always seeing each other as a whole and before an immense sky.”
―Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet
***
Elena Ferrante is the pen-name of an Italian novelist whose true identity is not publicly known. Though heralded as the most important Italian novelist of her generation, she has kept her identity secret since the publication of her first novel in 1992. She is the author of a half dozen novels and holds that "books, once they are written, have no need of their authors."
