Elena Ferrante

When her husband Mario leaves her, Olga, left to care for two young children, enters a long period of self-doubt and pity, until she acknowledges the truth about her marriage.

The Days of Abandonment

Brianna Hawkins

Riley Baker

I hated the idea that he knew everything about me while I knew little or nothing of him. I felt like someone who is blind and knows that he is being observed by the very people he would like to spy on in every detail.

Clay Carey

the books feels like looking at an old photo of yourself and not even recognizing that it’s you 

moon ramirez

full review to come but this was compelling enough for me to read in two sittings — just not as good as i expected, and this might be entirely my fault. i just i felt the story to be way too repetitive (more than it needs to be) at times. beautifully translated though!

lena

I was gifted this book and immediately was so excited to read it. I found this story so unique and compelling, I devoured it in a really short time. While a classic it was so refreshing to read and a very interesting view of the female experience of abandonment.

celiaa 

Although this read was repetitive at times, it was interesting and captivating. Whether good or bad captivating, it was a raw expression of the author and the story she wanted to write. I liked the lack of subtleties and softness at times, the honesty, the lack of care as to what a reader would think about her words. This book made me personally become more aware of how people can lose themselves in difficult times, it felt ridiculous at times, but it also awakened a sense  of vigilence and power in the woman in me, who also tends to get frightened about abandonment and dependency on other people. 

Nina Alexandra Bacrau

cedar winslow

damn. it’s not often i read a book cover to cover and stay viscerally engaged but miss feronte managed it! what an interesting and depressing protagonist and an interesting and depressing society and ugh men and yeah great book!

Rarely have the foundations upon which our ideas of motherhood and womanhood rest been so candidly questioned. This compelling novel tells the story of one woman’s headlong descent into what she calls an ‘absence of sense’ after being abandoned by her husband. Olga’s ‘days of abandonment’ become a desperate, dangerous freefall into the darkest places of the soul as she roams the empty streets of a city that she has never learned to love. When she finds herself trapped inside the four walls of her apartment in the middle of a summer heat wave, Olga is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal again. Elena Ferrante was born in Naples. She is the author of seven novels: The Days of Abandonment, Troubling Love, The Lost Daughter, and the quartet of Neapolitan Novels: My Brilliant Friend, The Story of a New Name, Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay, and The Story of the Lost Child. Fragments, a selection of interviews, letters and occasional writings by Ferrante, will be published in early 2016. She is one of Italy’s most acclaimed authors. Ann Goldstein has translated all of Elena Ferrante’s work. She is an editor at the New Yorker and a recipient of the PEN Renato Poggioli Translation Award. ‘Her novels are intensely, violently personal, and because of this they seem to dangle bristling key chains of confession before the unsuspecting reader.’ New Yorker ‘Everything Olga encounters becomes part of her pattern of thinking, and is accommodated as though it had always existed. This, rather than any graphic ‘candour’, is what makes Ferrante’s writing extraordinary.’ London Review ‘Ferrante puts hammer to flesh and invites her reader to penetrate the page.’ Financial Times ‘Every now and again, an author comes along who dares to remind us that the very pain of abandonment can ratchet us back a few evolutionary notches, knock us to the ground and leave us crawling, babbling like beasts.’ San Diego Union-Tribune ‘If that’s not a great literary novel, I don’t know what is.’ Elle ‘Ferrante is unflinching in drawing a mental landscape that is irrational and cruel...She writes like a rampage, her truth telling implacable and her fury kinetic. The tension in the pages is almost unbearable. The book is a startling treatise on how to stay alive when your world falls apart.’ New Zealand Listener

jillian tenner

Come si dice, I absolutely love the visceral feeling that the amazing writing gave me yet can not stand the main character absolutely fuck her and the way she treats her kids and maybe it’s that I’ve never been divorced but fuck her

This book was so well structured and well-written for being based off a singular event that happens in the first sentence of the book. The writing explores deeply the complications of motherhood and womanhood in modern society and does it in a way that flows so smoothly along with the rest of the plot. It’s an extremely depressing read in some sections while Olga kind of moves in and out of depressive episodes and hallucinations but one that always kept me engaged and had a generally happy ending so that’s always good!

"She is among the greatest Italian authors of recent years."-Corriere della Sera "Ferrante dissects the personal microcosm so well, and with awesome lucidity and precision shows us the meanderings of a woman's mind, the suffering that accompanies being abandoned, and the awful rumbling of time passing."-El Mundo "Elena Ferrante has given us a startlingly beautiful novel of exceptional and bold strength."-Il Manifesto "Severe and rigorously unsentimental, packed full of passages written with dizzying intensity at a rare and acute pitch. Ferrante is at her best when her writing holds tight to those nagging, niggling obsessions that make up our mental landscapes."-La Stampa A national bestseller for almost an entire year, The Days of Abandonment shocked and captivated its Italian public when first published. It is the gripping story of a woman's descent into devastating emptiness after being abandoned by her husband with two young children to care for. When she finds herself literally trapped within the four walls of their high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal.

Olivera Mitić

The typical Ferrante style shines through, while also managing to bring something new to the table. 

This was at times a very, very hard, emotionally draining and heavy read, but once Olga's sanity rises back up to the surface, it feels more than rewarding. Did it touch me as much as My Brilliant Friend did? No, but that's more a problem of the experiences I've had versus the things this book talks about. On that note, I hope that I won't ever be in a situation to relate to this fully.

Rarely have the foundations upon which our ideas of motherhood and womanhood rest been so candidly questioned. This compelling novel tells the story of one woman's headlong descent into what she calls an 'absence of sense' after being abandoned by her husband. Olga's Òdays of abandonment become a desperate, dangerous freefall into the darkest places of the soul as she roams the empty streets of a city that she has never learned to love. When she finds herself trapped inside the four walls of her apartment in the middle of a summer heat wave, Olga is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal again.

Kathryn

It was very uncomfortable to read, and I think that was the purpose of the writing. I do rate it high because this book made me feel something, and I hadn't had a book that made me rage and pity many things (or people) in it.

Prashant Prasad

loved this
gave the women destroyed by simone de beauvoir (which was referenced a couple of times in this)
the protagonist just seems so real and her actions are understandable even if they’re a bit morally dubious

“Stunning . . . The raging, torrential voice of the author is something rare.” —The New York Times Rarely have the foundations upon which our ideas of motherhood and womanhood rest been so candidly questioned. This compelling novel tells the story of one woman’s headlong descent into what she calls an “absence of sense” after being abandoned by her husband. Olga’s “days of abandonment” become a desperate, dangerous freefall into the darkest places of the soul as she roams the empty streets of a city that she has never learned to love. When she finds herself trapped inside the four walls of her apartment in the middle of a summer heat wave, Olga is forced to confront her ghosts, the potential loss of her own identity, and the possibility that life may never return to normal again.

Janet Doré

I did a no-no...I judged a book by it's cover. And, of course, it misled me. I was in the mood to get lost in a story of a woman freeing herself from the chains of a limiting life...losing herself in passion and a bit of ecstasy thrown in for good measure. If I would have read the book jacket, I would have been enlightened that I was treading into a completely different variety of losing oneself. But, I didn't...(because sometimes I want no hints). While the writing was OUTSTANDING, I found myself irritated by the pages and pages of a woman in the throes of mania. I'm all for a healthy breakdown every once in awhile, but this one went a bit too far for my personal taste.

Ferrante is decidely not my typical read, but I wanted to contrast her with Knausgaard, since I've seen so many comparisons of the two. 

I had a complicated relationship with the book, and with the narrator. Simply put, she descends into a sort of madness after her husband leaves her, and the entirety of the book documents this descent. The minutiae is everything, and that's the point. Ferrante puts us so far into the reader's head that we start to feel things with her as she goes about her daily life.

It was tough to get to that point of empathy- for me, at least. Her descent involves so much self-pitying, so much destructiveness, and so much outright cruelty (even towards her own children) that I began to wonder if Ferrante even *wanted* her readers to like the narrator. 

If you can pull through that, and the rambling abstractions that all too often accompany madness, this is an incredible read.