The Days of Abandonment

The Days of Abandonment is a 2002 novel by Italian author Elena Ferrante, first published in English in 2005. It follows the thirty-eight-year-old mother of two Olga, whose husband leaves her for another woman. During the breakdown that ensues, Olga loses control of her personality and fears that she will disintegrate altogether.

The novel opens with deceptive calm: “One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me.” The matter-of-fact tone of this sentence reflects how completely blindsided Olga is by her husband’s announcement. Olga is thirty-eight. She and her husband, Mario, have two children, Ilaria and Gianni. They live in Turin, far from Olga’s native Naples. She gave up her academic career to raise the children, while he continued with his.

Olga’s initial response is explosive anger, jealousy, hatred, and despair. She finds herself shouting uncontrollably at Mario.



In the weeks after Mario’s departure, however, Olga’s reaction deepens, and she begins to fear that without the security and meaning provided by the family unit, her very self will disintegrate: “What a mistake it had been to close off the meaning of my existence in the rites that Mario offered with cautious conjugal rapture,” she muses. “What a mistake it had been to entrust the sense of myself to his gratifications, his enthusiasms, to the ever more productive course of his life.”

Olga begins to dwell obsessively on a figure she remembers from her childhood in Naples, the “poverella,” “that poor woman,” who broke down after her husband left her and spent every night weeping, so that her neighbors could hear her. Olga resolves not to become a poverella herself.

This resolve proves difficult to put into practice. The ordinary tasks of daily life become impossible: seeing to the needs of the children; walking the dog; paying the bills. She spies on her downstairs neighbor, Carrano, an aging professional cellist.



Olga takes the dog, Otto, to the park and grows unreasonably angry with him when he barks at a young mother. When she returns home, she notices someone has been in the apartment and decides to change the locks. She flirts with the locksmiths and realizes that they are not excited by her. Later, she accidentally leaves Ilaria and Gianni at the park.

She encounters Mario on the street with his new partner, whom she recognizes as Carla, the twenty-year-old daughter of a friend whom Mario once tutored. Olga attacks Mario, knocking him down and tearing his clothes.

Gripped by a spasm of needy self-loathing, Olga tries to seduce Carrano. They give up when he cannot maintain an erection.



At home, things fall apart. There is an ant infestation. Her son Gianni is sick and so is the dog. The phone won’t work (Olga hasn’t paid the bill), and now she can’t seem to open the lock on the front door. Olga sees these small disasters as signs of her sexual failure and the weakness of her position as a woman. Recalling the workmen who had installed the faulty lock, she “remembered the sneer with which the older one had given me his card, in case I should need help. I knew perfectly well what lock he wished to intervene in, certainly not that of the reinforced door.”

Olga is trapped, and the dog appears to be dying. The building is empty and no one can hear her cries for help. Olga feels herself losing control; she can hardly focus on what is in front of her.

When she finally pulls out of this collapse, something has changed. She opens the door and deals with the various problems in the apartment. The dog has died.



Slowly, she rebuilds her life. Her friends try to set her up with some new men, but she balks. One night, she sees Carrano playing in an orchestra, and realizes she has misjudged and used him. He proves himself gentle and kindly, and the novel ends as they attempt to embark on a relationship.

The Days of Abandonment has been widely acclaimed as a modern classic of Italian literature. Ferrante (a pseudonym—the author’s real identity is unknown) is best known as the author of the Neapolitan Novels, a quartet of novels recounting the friendship of two women from a working-class neighborhood in Naples.