My view on The Days of Abandonment of Elena Ferrante

Not since Harif Kureishi book Intimacy have I found a book that has confronted me with some of my own feelings and realities in such gripping way, though Intimacy related to me to the later part of my life in my marriage and I found affinities connected to the emotional drainage of the man, the main character. In the Days of Abandonment I have found myself again in the early stages of my marriage, of my life defined as a wife, on the days of building a life, a dream of a family, of my unselfish love and idealism that lived in me and the similar challenges of my experience. 

Ferrante’s narration was to return to my own story through the ordeal Olga lives by losing herself upon losing her partner to another person, younger, more beautiful, more attractive, that of the sudden loss of the meaning of our life project, that of having bet all in that ideal of the happily family life and the discovery of a less than motivated companion that sticks around in dullness while he dreams of something else.  What a shock it is to find out that one is building something that carries no guaranties, not even those of a promise made to a God or the love that carried a couple  willingly to the altar, or that neither time accumulated of anniversaries celebrated nor children can protect.

Ferrante just like Ilaria with her paper cutter, poked me again and again to reality, traveling between the memories of my emotions that no longer hurt and to those  of Olga in her emotional distress. Reading this book was like a flashback between a known reality and her fiction, but is it fiction? No is not, that is the most devastating matter of the book. As I turned the pages angry and losing my patience at Olga for losing herself, I recalled my own months, years of trying to find my identity again, distraction, loss of emotional connection to the world and my beloved boy for a few weeks when he was three year old. 

It so easy to lose empathy when one has crossed that bridge, when one sees through the eyes of experience, maturity and even somehow cynicism. I apologized to Olga for my lack of empathy, for I did not rejoiced in the misery of her misfortune even though it  validated the fickleness of love and promises  made in marriage.

Then clarity comes after losing our sanity, the clarity that allows us to start seeing  ourselves for who we really are, and then value our own persona, the different parts that make us who we are and that are meaningful, those that depend on ourselves and those that depend on the relation to others. Olga didn't became the “poverella”, just as I didn't became "Laila in her loneliness" (entry in my blog from a woman named Laila from Bergen). It  is hard to know if the road shared with someone can lead us to that independent road that a break up usually gives a woman, but is a fact that in these modern times we still bet all on something that constantly contradicts our human nature.