THE DAYS OF ABANDONMENT

By Elena Ferrante.

Translated by Ann Goldstein.

188 pp. Europa Editions. Paper, $14.95.

IN Elena Ferrante's tale of one deserted wife's descent into disarray, the narrator's husband of 15 years suddenly announces that he is leaving because he's "confused . . . having terrible moments of weariness, of dissatisfaction, perhaps of cowardice." Thirty-eight-year-old Olga has long since abandoned her early identity as a writer and spent most of her married life caring for Mario, an engineer at the Polytechnic in Turin, and their two children. She sits in her increasingly disorderly home, writing frantic letters to Mario and trying to identify the moment when her marriage stopped being the mature, disciplined partnership she'd thought it to be.

When Mario does turn up, it's to visit the children and assure Olga that he is a sad, detestable man. "He wanted me to understand what sort of person I had lived with for 15 years. So he recounted to me cruel memories of childhood, terrible problems of adolescence, nagging disorders of early youth. He wanted only to speak ill of himself . . . a good-for-nothing, incapable of true feelings, mediocre, adrift even in his profession." Olga tries to comfort him, hoping that will bring him home, but her efforts are pointless. Mario's self-flagellation and sad litanies of confusion are, of course, just an act. He is in love with another woman.

After a distressing little incident involving glass in the pasta sauce (An innocent mistake? Or did she mean for him to cut his duplicitous tongue?), Mario decamps for good without leaving an address. Thoroughly deserted (the couple's friends, in time-honored fashion, opt for the happy husband over the scary, depressed wife), Olga enters a purgatory of rage and bereavement. She takes dangerous risks driving and barely remembers to feed her children. Even these tendencies fail to alarm her as much as her shifting use of language. Once a woman who "always put in the commas," she describes how, in the course of a month, she "went from using a refined language, attentive to the feelings of others, to a sarcastic way of expressing myself, punctuated by coarse laughter. Slowly, in spite of my resistance, I also gave in to obscenity."