When Olga, the protagonist of Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment, is first confronted with her husband Mario’s announcement that he’s leaving, she reacts to his “merciless rationality” with composure. We assume, as she assumes, that she loved him. The initial shock of reading about the days of Olga’s abandonment is a feeling that settles, over the course of the book, into a kind of pleasure.
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