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ebonyutley 's review for:
The Days of Abandonment
by Elena Ferrante
I haven’t read fiction regularly since college, and now most of the fiction I read is about infidelity and admittedly of an “uneven” quality. Days of Abandonment was legit literature though. A good writer makes you feel her characters, and I felt Olga’s desperation on nearly every single page. Even though I didn’t like her. Even though I disagreed with her decisions. Even though I was disgusted by her. A lot. I still felt her. Not sorry for her but felt her emotions. That is Ferrante’s gift to her readers. Also, the author is parsimonious with her words, and I appreciate that. The first line is “One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me.” There you have it folks. Direct and to the point. And then there are lines like this, “I had disappeared into his minutes, into his hours, so that he could concentrate.” (p.63) And this, “What a mistake, above all, it had been to believe that I couldn’t live without him, when for a long time I had not been at all certain that I was alive with him.” (p. 140) Days of Abandonment is the musings of a woman whose life is empty in her husband’s absence. A treatise for abandoned women reminding them that they can and will survive if they choose to do so and a word to the wise for pre-partnered women never to abandon themselves which, I surmise, is the most important message of all.