He's a prick so can you please stop thinking about him?

I have to say this as my first sentence that the novel pissed me off. I got so agitated, upset and aggressive reading it. Most of the time the only things present in my brain are "why the heck are you thinking about all these nonsense, Olga?" "WOMAN, please get yourself together" "Can you stop mentioning him? It makes me sick." It really seems like she keeps thinking about not becoming Poverella while in fact she doesn't do anything that she says she should do, up until Otto's death. And why did it take the death of a dog for Olga to realize that she does not love him anymore!? I am sorry but I am a dog lover and I cannot stand the scenes where dogs suffer and die.

Elena Ferrante did a REMARKABLE job in getting under my skin and renewing in me the sense of a marriage-phobic -though wait, does this term exist?

It is strange how I do not enjoy this novel as much as I enjoyed the first one, at least not until I got to the ending chapters. Maybe the relatability in this one is too strong that it has became negative, and the story being depicted is too piercing, to a point it hurts me and pains me to see Olga in her days of abandonment acting in such a disorganized, irrational, irresponsible way. I feel like the protagonist's agency was deprived as Mario left her. And that lack of agency and sense of self and direction pains me over everything else. It evokes in me a strong sense of hatred... A hatred towards whatever thing or person that has put the woman into this state of being. I enjoyed The Possession because that obsession came to me as something with agency, and even some type of lunatic, hysteric aestheticity, given it is jealousy experienced by an upper-middle class woman. The Days of Abandonment on the other hand feels too real, it gives me chills and creeps along my spine. It is the account of marriage that I would hate to see or experience. It, other than making me resent the incapacity of an abandoned woman, builds and solidifies my antagonism towards men. Everyone is scared of becoming Olga, less Poverella. Her desperation felt too real, her struggles too. There is no fairy tale in this book, but bloody, smoky realities. It elicits fear. The story has a faded tone of agony to it, except for the last two chapters.

Now that I have finished it, thinking about it as a work I have engaged with, I should still say it is a powerful book. It created a stir -if not a tempest- within me. It set off my emotions more strongly than the last novel did. Though I did not enjoy reading the suffering that Olga went through before she reconciled with herself and started living a normal life again, her growth, and how the story ended in the end, pleased me. Now that I think about it, the reason why I was uncomfortable reading the book might be because of the first-person perspective. Ferrante did it in a capturing way. The 1st person perspective allows me to experience all Olga's wild irrationalities in the smallest detail. I cannot rid myself off it as long as I am reading tentatively. And by reading tentatively I fall into her trap, I receive the rage, jealousy, humiliation, shame and desperation she undergoes. It is a pain shared through the black letters on a page. Olga was in my head when I read the book. Her pain was in my head, and that pain burned me just as much as it was burning her. 

"I want to drag along her beautiful face with the eyes the nose the lips the scalp the blond hair, I wanted to drag them with me as if with a hook I'd snagged her garmant of flesh, the sacks of her breasts, the belly that wrapped the bowels and spilled out through the asshole, through the deep crack crownd with gold. And leave her only that which in reality she was, an ugly skull stained with iving blood a skeleton that had just been skinned. Because what is the face what finally, is the skin over the flesh, a cover, a disguise rouge for the insupportable horror of our living nature. And he had fallen for it, he had been caught." (Ferrante, p71-72)

Taking the above quote as an example, I find it remarkable how Ferrante uses blatant, direct biological terms in describing what Olga thinks, imagines and feels. And I think she makes a great use of it. We avoid using these direct terms because of moral restraints, modesty, politeness, *codes of condect*. However, throughout the book they are used wildly without a trace of hesitance. That to me reads like a cynical attempt to decompress. The days of abandonment is a pithole. Olga sinks into it for months, during which she became wild, resentful, someone who is no longer her. Her imaginations and her fantasies are representations of her obsession, frustration and confusion. It has every right to be bold, nasty, bare, obscene and careless - because that is what abandonment feels like and what it makes you do. And I think Ferrante knows just how to do it right. Olga is an educated woman who retreated as a housewife for the love she had for her husband and her children. Even in her moments of extreme maniac we read philosophical interrogations that probe its readers, such as the fundamental question of human existence. What makes a human human? If we are in the end all one of the same thing, a creature that eats, eliminates and seek sexual gratification from other bodies, then why do we still care about love, commitment and promises? Why is it that we do not want to feel abandoned? Where is the fear coming from?

Now that I am writing this out, I think I might have figured out why I hated reading the book, yet in the end I come to praise it: I hated the feeling of abandonment, and the repelling imagination of me slipping into it potentially in this life. It got under my skin. It has shaken my genetic coding as a woman. It has creeped on me and plunged in me a fear for my kind. 

Moreover, strangely, this book reads feminist to me. It is unbearable to read, for the most part, however, I think it is precisely that unbearable feeling that adds to its value. A painfully bitter medicine is a good medicine for the soul, we always say that in Chinese. This novel is an alerting one to read, yet the empowerment, realization, and growth it embodies is something positive to sleep on. Something I would say is definitely "woman enhancing".

In the end, I might as well say that I am charmed by Carrano from the very beginning. And I am just very, very glad that Olga loved him in the end.