a few pages in and i began to understand why elena ferrante evokes the powerful response that she does. the newcomer is told (six of her novels are now in english) to start with the days of abandonment, and i picked up her book on the strength of overwhelming endorsement skimmed from numerous stars on friends’ good reads list without the faintest inkling of what her books were about, so that i only perceived my error about ‘abandonment’ nearly one chapter in. (query: does the italian word ‘abbandono’ have the double meaning (as in english) of desertion and neglect as well as that of dissipation, lassitude and implied debauchery?) had the syntax of the title been different i would have tilted to the former, but instead my instinct was to interpret it as the latter (perhaps also, the faint whisper of the days of being wild drew me towards the latter) that i was unprepared for the acute and distressing candour.how could people claim to have devoured this book in a single reading. her portrayal of personal madness (i prefer the old-fashioned word) and the disintegration of routine and the self has an almost hallucinatory quality at times — it is ferociously absorbing but also deep and clawingly raw — i had to keep putting it down every 8 or 10 pages to think about something else. and then the next day i sent it on to a woman friend, an academic who had just written to me about the unexpectedly incapacitating unhappiness from ending an ailing relationship (’i think you would want to read this — because we are people who respond to and make sense of our own crises through words and reading. In this she writes unflinchingly about the psychology of strong, intellectual women falling into despondency after betrayed love, the sporadic but feral emotion that punctuates the crisis (and the consuming self-reflexivity), the surprising collapse of the self and with it the dissolution of the physical being — all this with unsparing realism which forces you to face difficult emotional truths — she can, may, be helpful to you at this time…“)
ferrante is especially compelling for me at this time — after two semesters in the divorce courts, i’ve learnt to see the pattern of the socialised gender imbalance when marriages fail, and the uneven toll that this failure takes on the parties. (and yet it took a long time, almost three quarters thorough, before i drew that ancient parallel to other episodes in my life, but here, without remorse or sympathy, only mild clinical curiosity: was that what it was? like fingering a paper clip triangle the three points of which are olga-carla-mario, turning it over and over and in turn sympathetic with each character.) and i know something personally of how emotional desolation can be monstrously incapacitating (there is that word again) — by now i have lost several loves in my life (more often through betrayal than by death or by choice) — and how surprising this very incapacitation can be. (if every woman in grad school ought read middlemarch before marrying they ought read days of abandonment when their relationships end.) you recognise the obssessive vigilantism over the self, the clinging to dignity (the notion of dignity) as mantra, and the vacillation between this desperate control and rationality and the bitter resentment and suppressed sense of injustice that uncoils at the feather-touch of a misplaced word to lash at the other in full poisonous fury.
Best of the Transparent Hummingbird