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osame_o 's review for:
The Days of Abandonment
by Elena Ferrante
3.5
"What happens when, overflowing with love, you are no longer loved and are left with nothing?"
I liked this book and how it depicted what happens to a woman when, after building her life around a man, she is left by said man and must figure out how to rebuild herself. This book has a big middle portion, taking up around twenty-five percent of the story, in which our main character, Olga, is "trapped" inside her apartment and begins mentally spiraling while dealing with a sick kid and a maybe-poisoned dog. I really did not like this part of the book; I found the constant cycle of entering rooms, explaining her mental state, and repeating this pattern to be really repetitive and boring after a while. That would be my biggest complaint with the book.
I liked this quote, which showed how successful men's achievements are often built on the sacrifices of others—usually women—who give up their careers to do domestic work while the men accumulate sucesses: "They are things you worked on while I was there. I was taking care of you, I was doing the shopping, the cooking. It’s time that belongs to me in a way. Leave everything there."
Decent book, though I didn’t like the ending.
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Quotes
Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.
It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn’t even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.
you said that you had fallen into a void, an absence of sense, and it wasn’t true.You, you don’t know. At most you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole with Carla’s body.
“No. Just when I felt deceived, abandoned, humiliated, I loved you very much, I wanted you more than in any other moment of our life together.”
the circle of an empty day is brutal, and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.
you’re the one who confronts practical life every day, the obligations, the burden of the children.
Not even in moments of love had I ever sounded childish. A woman is a woman.
he wanted to be my bra so he could hug my chest, and my underpants and my skirt and the shoe stepped on by my foot, and the water that washed me and the cream that rubbed me and the mirror in which I looked at myself;
Wash the body, scent it, eliminate all unpleasant traces of physiology. To levitate. I wanted to detach myself from the earth, I wanted him to see me hovering on high, the way wholly good things do.
“Locks become habituated. They have to recognize the hand of their master.”
And now, now he had left me, carrying off, abruptly, all that time, all that energy, all that effort I had given him, to enjoy its fruits with someone else, a stranger who had not lifted a finger to bear him and rear him and make him become what he had become.
"What happens when, overflowing with love, you are no longer loved and are left with nothing?"
I liked this book and how it depicted what happens to a woman when, after building her life around a man, she is left by said man and must figure out how to rebuild herself. This book has a big middle portion, taking up around twenty-five percent of the story, in which our main character, Olga, is "trapped" inside her apartment and begins mentally spiraling while dealing with a sick kid and a maybe-poisoned dog. I really did not like this part of the book; I found the constant cycle of entering rooms, explaining her mental state, and repeating this pattern to be really repetitive and boring after a while. That would be my biggest complaint with the book.
I liked this quote, which showed how successful men's achievements are often built on the sacrifices of others—usually women—who give up their careers to do domestic work while the men accumulate sucesses: "They are things you worked on while I was there. I was taking care of you, I was doing the shopping, the cooking. It’s time that belongs to me in a way. Leave everything there."
Decent book, though I didn’t like the ending.
----------------
Quotes
Existence is this, I thought, a start of joy, a stab of pain, an intense pleasure, veins that pulse under the skin, there is no other truth to tell.
It was really true, there was no longer anything about him that could interest me. He wasn’t even a fragment of the past, he was only a stain, like the print of a hand left years ago on a wall.
you said that you had fallen into a void, an absence of sense, and it wasn’t true.You, you don’t know. At most you glanced down, you got frightened, and you plugged up the hole with Carla’s body.
“No. Just when I felt deceived, abandoned, humiliated, I loved you very much, I wanted you more than in any other moment of our life together.”
the circle of an empty day is brutal, and at night it tightens around your neck like a noose.
you’re the one who confronts practical life every day, the obligations, the burden of the children.
Not even in moments of love had I ever sounded childish. A woman is a woman.
he wanted to be my bra so he could hug my chest, and my underpants and my skirt and the shoe stepped on by my foot, and the water that washed me and the cream that rubbed me and the mirror in which I looked at myself;
Wash the body, scent it, eliminate all unpleasant traces of physiology. To levitate. I wanted to detach myself from the earth, I wanted him to see me hovering on high, the way wholly good things do.
“Locks become habituated. They have to recognize the hand of their master.”
And now, now he had left me, carrying off, abruptly, all that time, all that energy, all that effort I had given him, to enjoy its fruits with someone else, a stranger who had not lifted a finger to bear him and rear him and make him become what he had become.