The Days of Abandonment

"SC: Days of Abandonment is the second short novel that she wrote before the quartet. It’s the most suffocating book I can think of—an incredibly claustrophobic novel in that it’s literally about a woman who’s trapped in her apartment with her children and her dying German shepherd. SC: Exactly! ME: Olga, the narrator, has discovered that her husband has been cheating on her, and he’s left her. She must confront her pain and what his betrayal has done to her, how it has transformed her. And she must care for her children amidst it all. Being stuck in her apartment with nowhere to go is the exterior expression of what must happen—a necessary confrontation with her innermost self. “ Days of Abandonment is the most suffocating book I can think of” SC: Right. There’s nothing there except her own anxiety. And there are other characters—there’s the children, the sad dog, the neighbor. SC: No significant dolls. Maybe some minor dolls? ME: But there are a lot of scenes of her and her little daughter making themselves up in mirrors to look like dolls. There’s a fixation with makeup and self-fashioning in the novel. SC: I think it’s an exercise—the exercise of what it means to make yourself a woman. ME: And Olga’s doing it because she’s trying to find some way to just hold herself together. What’s interesting about the claustrophobia is that it’s a claustrophobia of disintegration. It’s like being in someone’s mind while that mind is totally falling to pieces. ME: Right. The exercise of looking in the mirror becomes this exercise of trying to contain yourself in some way. SC: The book is also the fictional exercise of being trapped in your home, the self you’ve constituted. It’s the opposite of home invasion; it’s the opposite of how most fiction works. There’s something so interesting about being with this one character in this one space. That image of disintegration—as you get scattered around the house, what happens? She moves around restlessly; there’s something wrong with the locks and she can’t get out. The dog has been poisoned and is dying. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter ME: She and the dog are clearly going through very similar things! SC: Right, and part of the horror of the dog is that what is wrong with him is unclear because it’s internal, like with Olga. Days of Abandonment also has a special place for me because I’d just moved into this apartment, and as Merve knows, the lock is tricky. People who visit are always confused because they think they’re locked in, and I hadn’t figured out how to turn the latch the right way when I first moved here. So I was reading this book, and then trying to get out of the house, and I remember being terrified thinking it was happening to me, too! But it’s amazing for other reasons. When people ask me what Ferrante book they should start with, I tell them to read Days of Abandonment because it’s short and full-on, and if you like it, you know you’ll like Ferrante. It’s a powerfully moving, wonderful book. It’s a life-ruiner. But to me, that’s a good thing. “She’s an enchanting describer of myth” ME: What’s extraordinary about the narrative is that it’s only after the dog dies, and the children start trying to enter the room with the dead dog in it, that Olga begins to pull herself together. Some version of herself has died with the dog, and it has freed her. I think we are released from the claustrophobia of her disintegration by the death of that former wife, that former lover, that former mother. SC: That former dog . . . ME: Yes, the former dog. It’s once that self is dead that something like the future becomes imaginable. Being locked in that room gives you the sense of time slowing down in the final stages of self-annihilation. You can’t imagine the next iteration or the next version of yourself until the one that’s been poisoned and is dying dies, and is assimilated into the present as only a specter, a shade, or a memory."