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Look at me, I said to the glass in a whisper, a breath. The mirror was summing up my situation- The worse side, the better side, geometry of the hidden.

The stage is set with everything at its right place. The lunch is prepared, served and without further ado, an unexpected and grievous announcement is made from across the table with a nonchalance rightly belonging to some stranger rather than that one dear person who shared with you yet another embarrassingly funny tale of his teenage self as a prelude to the unexceptional lovemaking just a couple of nights ago. The wonted calm abruptly gets replaced by an uninvited chaos and the neat arrangement of a happy home appears to be the mocking backdrop of a black comedy where things are supposed to take several turns for better or for worse...

Days of Abandonment are here along with an indefinite darkness.

Elena Ferrante by means of a gripping narration develops a combative atmosphere where hope, loneliness and anguish are engaged in an aggressive rivalry to claim their influence in the life of Olga. Olga- the dreamy adolescent, a thoughtful woman, mother of two kids, and a writer driven by need instead of love who now allocates a mere ten ordinary sentences to encapsulate her whole life which has been brutally impeded by the glaring title of ‘abandoned wife�. Abandoned not only by a husband but all those illusions that shaped her perceptions and gave way to a sedate persona that at once crumbled when came face to face with an undeserved misery.

The meanings, the meaning of her life—I suddenly understood—were only a dazzlement of late adolescence, my illusion of stability.

My thoughts while reading this book were diverse and conflicted. After each new chapter, I added one positive point, struck another negative remark and held the ambiguous ones to tease the cynic in me. The writing is suffused with astute observations and a relentless energy that remains faithful to Olga’s erratic state of mind but it demands understanding in a playful manner. Here’s a woman who discards her calculated sophistication and succumbs to a madcap behavior which at times displayed an almost caricatural representation of sentimentality- A grief so gaudy began to repel me. Though soon it becomes clear that what is actually on display is an ingenious show-not-tell example of articulating bewildered senses of an individual who feels utterly defenseless against the extremity of her desperation and simultaneously trying hard to analyse her situation by gathering subtle hints scattered all over her days of unexamined life.

If I were to start from there, from those secret emotions, perhaps I would understand better why he had gone and why I, who had always set against the occasional emotional confusion the stable order of our affections, now felt so violently the bitterness of loss, an intolerable grief, the anxiety of falling out of the web of certainties and having to relearn life without the security of knowing how to do it.

Perhaps this is a book Ferrante never aspired to write and this is definitely a story Olga never wanted to live but these stories are like rippled reflections in the ocean of harsher truths that real lives are and one becomes their protagonist owing to that unpredictable stroke of destiny when our dreams never come true but our nightmares sometimes do.