The Days of Abandonment

Mario is a slimy POS who ditches his wife for a twenty year who he was dating when she was still a minor (like the other woman was 16) so definitely grooming. Our mains friends are awful who never condemn mario (he literally abandons the kids and the dog) but they tell her to accept it and never really help her.

This book, is her falling apart and coming back together and really goes through the full spectrum of things that happen when a marriage falls apart. The kids, her life, the dog.

The way Ferrante writes is insane, it feels like a dream, but you’re also filled with anxiety. ( )

Indimenticabile!
Coinvolgente fin dalle primissime pagine. Stile eccelso e ineguagliabile. ( )

I liked this book very much. It consisted mostly of what was going on in her mind after her husband abandoned her for another woman. Just trying to get out of bed every day and go through the motions of being completely on her own, taking care of two children and having no career and wondering what the heck you're going to do now, on your own. ( )

She's such a shit, Olga. Don't get me wrong, everybody is, with the possible exception of the downstairs neighbour. The kids are shits. The ex-husband, his shag, the friends, the vet, the locksmiths. But as we enter the falling-apart world of Olga, and we do so from the perspective, impossible to escape, of The Neapolitan Novels, it's an echo. Her female narrators are repugnant. In this case it's not because she's disintegrating. It's just because. I suppose because she's talking of herself. If that is so, Ferrante is a particularly honest writer. One hopes never to meet her.

I'm also not sure how long she can get away with writing books with the principle character a writer who isn't really very good. Any writer who needs to keep explaining to their audience 'as if it were', 'it was like', 'like' but above all, 'as if' 'as if' 'as if'. Such a lazy way to write. And almost every phrase that comes after the big sign - simile coming - is dreadful.

On the plus side, full marks to her for recording surely the most disastrous excruciatingly embarrassing (for the reader) sex scene ever. In minute detail. I will present this for you, it gives a good idea of the book as a whole. She has come downstairs on purpose to have sex with her rather retiring neighbour, whom she scarcely knows. Lucky Carrano. He has just kissed her, understanding that this might be the right thing to do....[The square brackets comments are mine, once or twice I couldn't resist.]
At that instant I had only an unpleasant impression, as if he had given the signal and from then on all I could do was to sink by degrees into repugnance. In reality I felt above all a blaze of hatred towards myself, because I was there, because I had no excuses, because it was I who had decided to come, because it seemed to me that I could not retreat.

'Shall we begin?' I said with a false cheer.

Carrano gave an uncertain hint of a smile.

'No one is forcing us,'

'Do you want to go back?'

'No...'

He again brought his lips to mine, but I didn't like the odor of his saliva, I don't even know if it really was unpleasant, only it seemed to me different from Mario's. He tired to put his tongue in my mouth, I opened my lips a little, touched his tongue with mine. It was slightly rough, alive, it felt animal, an enormous tongue such as I had seen, disgusted, at the butcher, there was nothing seductively human about it. Did Carla [the shag] have my tastes, my odors? Or had mine always been repellent to Mario, as now Carrano's seemed to me, and only in her, after years, had he found the essences right for him?

I pushed my tongue into the mouth of that man with exaggerated eagerness, for a long time, as if I were following something to the bottom of his throat and wished to catch it before it slid into the esophagus. I put my arm around his neck, I pressed him with my body into the corner of the sofa and kissed him for a long time, with my eyes wide open, trying to stare at the objects arranged in one corner of the room, define them, cling to them, because I was afraid that if I closed my eyes I would see Carla's impudent mouth, she had had that impudence since the age of fifteen, and who could say how much Mario liked it, if he had dreamed of it while he slept beside me, until he woke and kissed me as if he were kissing her and then withdrew and went back to sleep as soon as he recognised my mouth, the usual mouth, the mouth without new tastes, the mouth of the past.

Carrano sensed in my kiss the sign that any skirmishing was over. He put his hand on my neck, he wanted to press me even harder against his lips. Then he left my mouth and planted wet kisses on my cheeks, on my eyes. I thought he must be following a precise exploratory plan, he even kissed my ears, so that the sound echoed annoyingly against my eardrums. Then he moved to my neck, he bathed with his tongue the hair at the nape, and meanwhile he touched my chest with his broad hand.

'My breasts are small,' I said in a whisper, but immediately despised myself because it sounded as if I were making excuses, excuse me if I can't offer you big tits, I hope you enjoy yourself anyway, idiot that I was, if he liked little tits, good; if not, the worse for him, it was all free, a stroke of luck had fallen to this shit, the best birthday present he could hope for, at his age.

'I like them, ' he said in a whisper, while he unbuttoned my shirt and with his hand pulled down the edge of the bra and tried to bite my nipples and suck them. But mu nipples, too, are small, and the breasts eluded him, falling back into the cups of the bra. I said wait, I pushed him away, I sat up, I took off the shirt, unhooked the bra. I asked stupidly: do you like them, anxiety was growing in me, I wanted him to repeat his approval.

Looking at me he sighed:

'You're beautiful.'

He took a deep breath, as if he wished to control a strong emotion or nostalgia, and just touched me with his fingertips so that I lay on the sofa with my chest bare and he could gaze at me more easily.

Lying there, I saw him from below, I noted the wrinkles of his aging neck, the beard that needed a shave and showed flecks of white, the deep creases between his eyebrows. Perhaps he was serious, perhaps he really was captivated by my beauty, or perhaps they were only words to ornament a desire for sex. Perhaps I remained beautiful even if my husband had rolled up the sense of my beauty into a ball and thrown it into the wastebasket, like wrapping paper [one of her many likes....if only she could resist them.] Yes, I could still make a man passionate, I was a woman able to do this, the flight of Mario to another bed, another flesh, had not ruined me.

Carrano bent over me, licked my nipples, sucked them. I tried to abandon myself, I wanted to eliminate disgust and desperation from my breast. I closed my eyes cautiously, the warmth of his breath, the lips on my skin, I let out a moan of encouragement for me and for him. I hoped to notice in myself some nascent pleasure, even if that man was a stranger, a musician perhaps of little talent, no quality, no capacity for seduction, dull and therefore alone.

Now I felt him kissing my ribs, my stomach, he stopped even on my navel, what he found there I don't know, he moved his tongue in it, tickling me. Then he got up. I opened my eyes, he was rumpled, his eyes were bright, I seemed to see in his face the expression of a guilty child.

'Tell me again that you like me,' I insisted, short of breath.

'Yes,' he said, but with a little less enthusiasm. He put his hands on my knees, parted them, slid his fingers under my skirt, caressed the insides of my thighs, lightly, as if [warning, bad simile coming] he were sending a probe into the dark depths of a well.

He didn't seem to be in a hurry, I would have preferred everything to proceed more quickly. Now I thought of the possibility that the children might wake up or even of the hypothesis that Mario, after our tumultuous encounter, frightened, repentant, had decided to return home that very evening. It even seemed to me that I could hear Otto barking joyfully, and I was about to say the dog is barking, but then it seemed to me inappropriate. Carrano had just raised my skirt and was now caressing the crotch of my underpants with the palm of his hand, and then he ran his fingers over the material, pressing, pushing it deep into the fold of my sex.

I moaned again, I wanted to help him take off the underpants, he stopped me.

'No,' he said, 'wait.'

He moved aside the material, caressed my bare sex with his fingers, entered with his index finger, murmured again:

'You've really beautiful.'

Beautiful everywhere, outside and in, male fantasies. Was Mario doing that, with me he had never taken his time. But maybe he, too, now, in the long night, somewhere else, was spreading Carla's thin legs, letting his gaze rest on her cunt half covered by the underpants, lingering, his heart pounding, on the obscenity of that position, making it more obscene with his fingers. Or, who knows, maybe it was I alone who was obscene now, abandoned to that man who was touching me in secret places, who, in no hurry, was bathing his fingers inside me, with the casual curiosity of one who isn't in love. Carla, on the other hand - Mario believed this, I was certain that he believed it - was a young woman in love who gives herself to her lover. Not a gesture, not a sigh was vulgar or sordid, not even the coarsest words had any power against the true meaning of their intercourse. I could say cunt and cock and asshole, they were not marked by it. I marked, I disfigured, only my own image on the sofa, what I was at that moment, rumpled, with Carrano's big fingers rousing in me a fund of muddy pleasure.

Again I felt like crying, I clenched my teeth. I didn't know what to do, I didn't want to burst into tears again, I reacted by moving my pelvis, shaking my head, moaning, murmuring:

'You want me, it's true that you want me, tell me...'

Carrano nodded yes, pushed me onto my side, pulled down my underpants. I have to leave, I thought. Now what I wanted to know I knew. I am still attractive to men. Mario took everything but not me, not m y person, not my beautiful charming mask. That's enough with my ass. He was biting my buttocks, licking me.

'Not my ass.' I said, moving his fingers away. He touched my anus again, I moved him away again. Enough. I drew back, I stretched a hand toward his bathrobe.

'Let's get it over with,' I exclaimed. 'Do you have a condom?'

Carrano nodded yes but didn't move. He took his hands off my body, showing a sudden sadness, and leaned his head on the back of the sofa, stared at the ceiling.

'I don't feel anything,' he murmured.

'What don't you feel?'

'An erection.' [Well, who would after 'Let's get it over with'?]

'Never?'

'No, now.'

'Since we started?'

'Yes.'

I felt myself flare up with shame. He had kissed me, embraced me, touched me, but he hadn't gotten hard, I hadn't been able to make his blood burn, he had roused my flesh without rousing his, ugly shit.

I opened his bathrobe, now I couldn't leave, between the fourth floor and the fifth there were no longer stairs, if I left I would find the abyss.

I looked at his small pallid sex, lost in the black forest of hairs, between the heavy testicles.

'Don't worry,' I said, 'you're upset.'

I jumped up, I took off the skirt that I was still wearing, I was naked, but he didn't even realise it, he continued to look at the ceiling.

'Now you lie down,' I ordered him with false calm. 'Relax.'

I pushed him down on the sofa, supine, in the position in which until that moment I had been.

'Where are the condoms?'

He gave a melancholy smile.

'It's useless at this point,' and yet he pointed to a chest of drawers with a gesture of discouragement.

I went to the chest, opened one drawer after another, found the condoms.

'But I was attractive to you...' Again I insisted.

He hit his forehead lightly with the back of his hand.

'Yes, in my mind.'

I laughed angrily, I said:

'You have to like me everywhere,' and I sat on his chest, turning my back to him. I began to caress his stomach, going slowly lower and lower along the black track of hairs to where they were thick around his sex.

rest here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2018/09/05/the-days-of-abandonment-b... ( )

She's such a shit, Olga. Don't get me wrong, everybody is, with the possible exception of the downstairs neighbour. The kids are shits. The ex-husband, his shag, the friends, the vet, the locksmiths. But as we enter the falling-apart world of Olga, and we do so from the perspective, impossible to escape, of The Neapolitan Novels, it's an echo. Her female narrators are repugnant. In this case it's not because she's disintegrating. It's just because. I suppose because she's talking of herself. If that is so, Ferrante is a particularly honest writer. One hopes never to meet her.

I'm also not sure how long she can get away with writing books with the principle character a writer who isn't really very good. Any writer who needs to keep explaining to their audience 'as if it were', 'it was like', 'like' but above all, 'as if' 'as if' 'as if'. Such a lazy way to write. And almost every phrase that comes after the big sign - simile coming - is dreadful.

On the plus side, full marks to her for recording surely the most disastrous excruciatingly embarrassing (for the reader) sex scene ever. In minute detail. I will present this for you, it gives a good idea of the book as a whole. She has come downstairs on purpose to have sex with her rather retiring neighbour, whom she scarcely knows. Lucky Carrano. He has just kissed her, understanding that this might be the right thing to do....[The square brackets comments are mine, once or twice I couldn't resist.]
At that instant I had only an unpleasant impression, as if he had given the signal and from then on all I could do was to sink by degrees into repugnance. In reality I felt above all a blaze of hatred towards myself, because I was there, because I had no excuses, because it was I who had decided to come, because it seemed to me that I could not retreat.

'Shall we begin?' I said with a false cheer.

Carrano gave an uncertain hint of a smile.

'No one is forcing us,'

'Do you want to go back?'

'No...'

He again brought his lips to mine, but I didn't like the odor of his saliva, I don't even know if it really was unpleasant, only it seemed to me different from Mario's. He tired to put his tongue in my mouth, I opened my lips a little, touched his tongue with mine. It was slightly rough, alive, it felt animal, an enormous tongue such as I had seen, disgusted, at the butcher, there was nothing seductively human about it. Did Carla [the shag] have my tastes, my odors? Or had mine always been repellent to Mario, as now Carrano's seemed to me, and only in her, after years, had he found the essences right for him?

I pushed my tongue into the mouth of that man with exaggerated eagerness, for a long time, as if I were following something to the bottom of his throat and wished to catch it before it slid into the esophagus. I put my arm around his neck, I pressed him with my body into the corner of the sofa and kissed him for a long time, with my eyes wide open, trying to stare at the objects arranged in one corner of the room, define them, cling to them, because I was afraid that if I closed my eyes I would see Carla's impudent mouth, she had had that impudence since the age of fifteen, and who could say how much Mario liked it, if he had dreamed of it while he slept beside me, until he woke and kissed me as if he were kissing her and then withdrew and went back to sleep as soon as he recognised my mouth, the usual mouth, the mouth without new tastes, the mouth of the past.

Carrano sensed in my kiss the sign that any skirmishing was over. He put his hand on my neck, he wanted to press me even harder against his lips. Then he left my mouth and planted wet kisses on my cheeks, on my eyes. I thought he must be following a precise exploratory plan, he even kissed my ears, so that the sound echoed annoyingly against my eardrums. Then he moved to my neck, he bathed with his tongue the hair at the nape, and meanwhile he touched my chest with his broad hand.

'My breasts are small,' I said in a whisper, but immediately despised myself because it sounded as if I were making excuses, excuse me if I can't offer you big tits, I hope you enjoy yourself anyway, idiot that I was, if he liked little tits, good; if not, the worse for him, it was all free, a stroke of luck had fallen to this shit, the best birthday present he could hope for, at his age.

'I like them, ' he said in a whisper, while he unbuttoned my shirt and with his hand pulled down the edge of the bra and tried to bite my nipples and suck them. But mu nipples, too, are small, and the breasts eluded him, falling back into the cups of the bra. I said wait, I pushed him away, I sat up, I took off the shirt, unhooked the bra. I asked stupidly: do you like them, anxiety was growing in me, I wanted him to repeat his approval.

Looking at me he sighed:

'You're beautiful.'

He took a deep breath, as if he wished to control a strong emotion or nostalgia, and just touched me with his fingertips so that I lay on the sofa with my chest bare and he could gaze at me more easily.

Lying there, I saw him from below, I noted the wrinkles of his aging neck, the beard that needed a shave and showed flecks of white, the deep creases between his eyebrows. Perhaps he was serious, perhaps he really was captivated by my beauty, or perhaps they were only words to ornament a desire for sex. Perhaps I remained beautiful even if my husband had rolled up the sense of my beauty into a ball and thrown it into the wastebasket, like wrapping paper [one of her many likes....if only she could resist them.] Yes, I could still make a man passionate, I was a woman able to do this, the flight of Mario to another bed, another flesh, had not ruined me.

Carrano bent over me, licked my nipples, sucked them. I tried to abandon myself, I wanted to eliminate disgust and desperation from my breast. I closed my eyes cautiously, the warmth of his breath, the lips on my skin, I let out a moan of encouragement for me and for him. I hoped to notice in myself some nascent pleasure, even if that man was a stranger, a musician perhaps of little talent, no quality, no capacity for seduction, dull and therefore alone.

Now I felt him kissing my ribs, my stomach, he stopped even on my navel, what he found there I don't know, he moved his tongue in it, tickling me. Then he got up. I opened my eyes, he was rumpled, his eyes were bright, I seemed to see in his face the expression of a guilty child.

'Tell me again that you like me,' I insisted, short of breath.

'Yes,' he said, but with a little less enthusiasm. He put his hands on my knees, parted them, slid his fingers under my skirt, caressed the insides of my thighs, lightly, as if [warning, bad simile coming] he were sending a probe into the dark depths of a well.

He didn't seem to be in a hurry, I would have preferred everything to proceed more quickly. Now I thought of the possibility that the children might wake up or even of the hypothesis that Mario, after our tumultuous encounter, frightened, repentant, had decided to return home that very evening. It even seemed to me that I could hear Otto barking joyfully, and I was about to say the dog is barking, but then it seemed to me inappropriate. Carrano had just raised my skirt and was now caressing the crotch of my underpants with the palm of his hand, and then he ran his fingers over the material, pressing, pushing it deep into the fold of my sex.

I moaned again, I wanted to help him take off the underpants, he stopped me.

'No,' he said, 'wait.'

He moved aside the material, caressed my bare sex with his fingers, entered with his index finger, murmured again:

'You've really beautiful.'

Beautiful everywhere, outside and in, male fantasies. Was Mario doing that, with me he had never taken his time. But maybe he, too, now, in the long night, somewhere else, was spreading Carla's thin legs, letting his gaze rest on her cunt half covered by the underpants, lingering, his heart pounding, on the obscenity of that position, making it more obscene with his fingers. Or, who knows, maybe it was I alone who was obscene now, abandoned to that man who was touching me in secret places, who, in no hurry, was bathing his fingers inside me, with the casual curiosity of one who isn't in love. Carla, on the other hand - Mario believed this, I was certain that he believed it - was a young woman in love who gives herself to her lover. Not a gesture, not a sigh was vulgar or sordid, not even the coarsest words had any power against the true meaning of their intercourse. I could say cunt and cock and asshole, they were not marked by it. I marked, I disfigured, only my own image on the sofa, what I was at that moment, rumpled, with Carrano's big fingers rousing in me a fund of muddy pleasure.

Again I felt like crying, I clenched my teeth. I didn't know what to do, I didn't want to burst into tears again, I reacted by moving my pelvis, shaking my head, moaning, murmuring:

'You want me, it's true that you want me, tell me...'

Carrano nodded yes, pushed me onto my side, pulled down my underpants. I have to leave, I thought. Now what I wanted to know I knew. I am still attractive to men. Mario took everything but not me, not m y person, not my beautiful charming mask. That's enough with my ass. He was biting my buttocks, licking me.

'Not my ass.' I said, moving his fingers away. He touched my anus again, I moved him away again. Enough. I drew back, I stretched a hand toward his bathrobe.

'Let's get it over with,' I exclaimed. 'Do you have a condom?'

Carrano nodded yes but didn't move. He took his hands off my body, showing a sudden sadness, and leaned his head on the back of the sofa, stared at the ceiling.

'I don't feel anything,' he murmured.

'What don't you feel?'

'An erection.' [Well, who would after 'Let's get it over with'?]

'Never?'

'No, now.'

'Since we started?'

'Yes.'

I felt myself flare up with shame. He had kissed me, embraced me, touched me, but he hadn't gotten hard, I hadn't been able to make his blood burn, he had roused my flesh without rousing his, ugly shit.

I opened his bathrobe, now I couldn't leave, between the fourth floor and the fifth there were no longer stairs, if I left I would find the abyss.

I looked at his small pallid sex, lost in the black forest of hairs, between the heavy testicles.

'Don't worry,' I said, 'you're upset.'

I jumped up, I took off the skirt that I was still wearing, I was naked, but he didn't even realise it, he continued to look at the ceiling.

'Now you lie down,' I ordered him with false calm. 'Relax.'

I pushed him down on the sofa, supine, in the position in which until that moment I had been.

'Where are the condoms?'

He gave a melancholy smile.

'It's useless at this point,' and yet he pointed to a chest of drawers with a gesture of discouragement.

I went to the chest, opened one drawer after another, found the condoms.

'But I was attractive to you...' Again I insisted.

He hit his forehead lightly with the back of his hand.

'Yes, in my mind.'

I laughed angrily, I said:

'You have to like me everywhere,' and I sat on his chest, turning my back to him. I began to caress his stomach, going slowly lower and lower along the black track of hairs to where they were thick around his sex.

rest here: https://alittleteaalittlechat.wordpress.com/2018/09/05/the-days-of-abandonment-b... ( )