A Girl Returned (Who?)

Posted on September 30, 2026 by Sofia

I found this one rather slow to get into but it was okay.  I got strong My Brilliant Friend vibes from this one, but it wasn’t as good. (Okay Sofia, we get it, nothing is as a good as My Brilliant Friend, go on with the blog now).

The beginning was somehat cliché, a reverse Cinderella story if you will, with a girl who goes from loving “parents” to poverty. It felt a little dramatized; having all of her real family forget her birthday, sharing a bed with her bed-wetting sister in a room full of adolescent boys, who are in fact her brothers, having an incest thing with her eighteen-year-old brother who only hangouts with “Gypsies” and then tragically dies in a motorbike accident. Maybe I shouldn’t say “dramatic”, as these things do happen to people, but I felt like it was almost for effect at times.

On that confusing note, the narrator calls her mothers by various names throughout the story whereas she herself is never called by any name. I found to be one of the most successful writing techniques implemented in the novel. At first her adoptive mother is “my mother” and then “adoptive mother” and then “my aunt” and then Adalgisa, whereas her biological mother is mostly referred to as “the mother” then finally “my mother” at the end. These changes were confusing, but I felt that we were confused alongside the narrator as she struggled to understand why she was left by her biological mom, then again by Adalgisa. But I like the distinction, of “my” and “the” especially when you look at her sister Adriana, who from the start is referred to as “my sister”. Perhaps these possessives give the main character a sense of control over a life she has no control over.

Also, how crazy of Adalgisa to basically pressure an impoverished pregnant distant cousin of her husband’s (who she leaves cause he can’t get her pregnant, so they basically have no relation) into giving her her newborn daughter and then when she leaves her husband for a guy who gets her pregnant 13 years later, she just dumps the kid back with her biological family without telling the girl why. I think the end lunch scene with her new husband Guido was supposed to redeem her a bit, as we see that he has been keeping Adalgisa away from the narrator, since he’s an abusive control freak who won’t let his wife tend to her own crying baby but still. I felt extremely patronized on our main character’s behalf when she find out the whole situation from little Adriana and Adalgisa says “You were too young for the truth, I wanted to wait till you got a little older” (155). I hate when adults talk to children like they aren’t capable of thoughts.

Anyways this blog post was extremely difficult to write, with all the different mothers, and the fact that the main character has no name, ughhhhhhhh. Okay maybe not extremely difficult but still. Considering this book was just “okay” looks like I had a lot to say, I cut out a whole paragraph. Now I’m just rambling. The song I chose isn’t my favourite but it was way too perfect: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iMr69JihnP4

Sofia

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“How many stereotypes do you want?” YES!

Posted on September 29, 2026 by juligalv

The story presented by Di Pietrantonio makes its point quite clear: imagine the horror of being taken away from your mother to another family and on top that they are poor!

She develops the story creating a cartoonish way of representing poverty: wet beds (23), plucking a chicken (38), family violence, a dead gypsy – friend brother, interfamily sex abuse, and so on. It is quite stereotypical the way she portrays the situations, the characters, and the linear development of the main character.

It was obvious from the beginning that lastly, she will notice that regardless of being utterly poor and violent the second family, mainly her sister Adriana, has something that money can’t buy: love. Beautiful isn’t?

The rest of the story and the different characters, and events: she going to the school and facing the reality that in the new family almost everyone is illiterate, the “growth” she develops when learning to face situations, the ins and outs of the absent 1st mother and the father, who only give her present that are precious but they are wasted in the hostile environment of the new family.

There was a particular event that caught my attention it was the most exaggeratedly way to represent solitude. She is celebrating her birthday, which no one knows, and she buys a piece of pastry, lock herself up in a basement and “Then I blew it out with a puff and solitary applause, and I sang “Happy Birthday”, whispering in the darkness” (Chapter 25). Oh my god! It is a Sunday tv show, it’s a Televisa production.

Well enough with the rant.

One thing that happened to me was that before the term started, I found on the workday page of the course a tentative list of the chosen novels for the course, and among them was one of Elena Ferrante: My brilliant friend (2011). When I started to read A Girl Returned, I thought I was reading an adaptation or the same book because there are so many resemblances, not only in the characters and narrators but also in the way of writing, the issues of poverty, of dealing with the impossibility of going normally to school, and so on. I wonder if the author noticed the success of Ferrante and got influenced, I guess we’ll never know.

I think it’s pretty obvious that I didn’t like the novel. I think that the situations that impoverished people deals can be represented from outside, but the writer must avoid the tremendous stereotypes that Di Pietrantonio reproduces. Poverty is not only cruelty, bad odours, violence, broken things and dead brothers. That is what a certain part of the society thinks and wants to read about. Because they are safe when they close the book.

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week 4 A Girl Returned – reject those who define you

Posted on September 28, 2026 by dnabi

Today I went to the UBC Belkin Art Gallery exhibit “Dimensions of Intimacy” by Jana Sterbak and loved this piece from 1987 called “House of Pain: A Relationship”. (I’ll try to get a better photo – picture a series of tortures and then you just start over). Relationships are extremely painful, but we welcome them as the piece explains. Our course opened with the difficulties of broken middle-class marriages, but this print also explains today’s book’s difficult relationships between parents, daughters, and siblings. All relationships are painful and restrictive, according to Sterbak.

What stuck out on first reading

Reviews on the book jacket call it feverish powerful writing , saying the writing has immediacy and rare expressive intensity. Edited by Ferrante’s editor this promises to be enjoyable!

The first thing I noticed was that again this week, the main character has no name but is given a nickname. “the Arminuta” meaning the girl who returned, like “the poverella” reducing the girl to a caricature.

The story starts bluntly with a 13-year-old girl meeting her “other” mother and family (13). She has so many interesting names for this mother; “first mother” (14), “the mother” (29), “the mother in the town” (51), while the mother she left is called “my mother” (26), “real parents” (35), “my seaside mother” (43, 104). But as the arminuta matures, she switches things up and calls her new mother “my mother” (124, 161), and her old mother “my adoptive mother” (144). The arminuta uses “my” when she likes someone – Adriana from the start while calling the boys “the” for example.

The arminuta accepts her new ‘working class’ lifestyle but maintains contact with her old life through her friend Patrizia’s family. Near the end her ‘seaside mother’ is finally ready to have Adriana back in her life as before at the seaside home as the arminuta has always dreamed of, however the arminuta hurtfully flings “you didn’t come to see me once” (155) and we know that she has finished working her way through things.

During reading it seemed the story was centred on the arminuta wrestling with what a mother is, even saying “I really don’t know what place a mother is” (107) until finally sensing weakness bleeds her mother for money for a better school than boarding school (125), and equal treatment for her new sister Adriana (156) “as if she were not my mother but a wealthy old aunt willing to pay for my future”. (126). It is her sister Adriana who goes to the beach with her, swims naked with her, (169), and receives the compliment “my sister from her I learned resistance” (170). In the end it is a story about sisterhood, not mothers and daughters, a lesson that the past does not control the future and that you can resist relationships chosen for you by others (and society?).

My question is, are relationships luck and circumstance, or hard work? Or like a pair of shared jeans, they just fit into sisterhood? https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/series/STV/the-sisterhood-of-the-traveling-pants/

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The Obsession: Ernaux on The Possession of Minds

Posted on September 27, 2026 by dleoar

L’Occupation

Annie Ernaux’s The Possession heralds a period of realistic literature where modern accounts of subaltern experiences are deemed “not literature.” Ernaux proves these critics wrong, writing a “stereotypical” crazy girlfriend into canonical literature. I am not saying this masterpiece is canonical yet, but that it should be!

This is a great first read for the syllabus. For one, I enjoyed the Durassian fragmentation, the exploration of a Self and an Other, the Older self reminiscing on the younger self. For two, the candidness of language is amazing. The narrator protagonist has just been left for another woman. She speaks her mind, no filter.

The ex-boyfriend is still in contact with the narrator, doesn’t tell of the other woman. Ernaux charts the actions we are agents of, the extremities of seeking an elusive truth. In the immensities of Being and possessing qualities Ernaux uses obsession to explore what separates the Self from the Other: what does the other woman possess that the narrator does not? And what does it mean for the Self to discover that another person desires someone other than her?

As for the Durassian fragments, is each fragment a memory? Then Ernaux’s The Possession also explores memory-narration. As novelist, Viet Than Nguyen’s describes Marguerite Duras as “exploiting the most fundamental tricky parts of our recall- do we seek out a memory or does it find us?”. Ernaux, heavily inspired by Duras’ fragmented form seems to adapt philosophy to explore memory.

The novella starts with the older-narrator self confessing:

I have always wanted to write as if I would be gone when the book was published. To write as if I were about to die— no more judges. Even if it’s an illusion, perhaps, to believe that truth comes only by way of death. (6) 

Writing as memory-recall. That seems another theme Ernaux explores in this slim but dense novella. Writing as a means to explore the self, to self-understand, self-mythologize.

It is interesting that the narrator-protagonist seeks to stalk and be obsessed with the other woman as opposed to the man who just left her.

I caught glimpses of all the acts I would have been capable of if society hadn’t constrained my impulses; for example, instead of simply looking up the name of this woman on the Internet, shooting her with a revolver while screaming “Bitch! Bitch! Bitch!” Something I had done at times, at the top of my voice, without the revolver. My suffering, at base, was about not being able to kill her. And I envied the primitive morals of brutish societies whereby one would kidnap the person or even assassinate her, resolving the situation in minutes and avoiding the prolongation—which appeared to me endless—of suffering. Suddenly I understood the leniency of the courts toward so-called crimes of passion, their loathing to apply a law that tells us to punish murderers, a law derived from reason and necessity but which runs counter to another more visceral one: the right to eliminate the man or woman who has taken over your body and your mind. Their desire, at base, not to condemn the final act of a person who is prey to an intolerable suffering, the act of Othello and of Roxanne. (19)

For a slim novella (memoir?), this fragment not only explores jealously, but also social contract theory and civilization theory. It is a self constructing a self through societal learned expectations — such as social contract, behaving civilized to avoid punishment in society. In this way, the mind is possessed by an ideological, generational and imperative way of living.

Question: What do you make of the rage the narrator has towards the other woman and not W.?

C’est Tout.

 

 

 

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Days of Abandonment: Ferrante on Resilience

Posted on September 25, 2026 by dleoar

DAYS OF ABANDONMENT is a novel of grief as it is of growth; Olga is a resilient woman. The story baseline unfolds a psychological trigger on Olga, her husband Mario has just announced leaving Olga and her two kids for a younger woman.

Olga, at the beginning is rationalizing. Her mind reasons on past memories of Mario leaving her previously, then coming back and explain being “out of sense.” Perhaps, denial is the first stage within Olga’s navigation of stages of grief towards greater self-sufficiency, understanding the self post-trauma, dismantling the self and emotional flourishing within a new marked temporality in life. Albeit, that raises nuances one must consider. For instance, if Mario is a marker of a temporality within Olga’s life, of Mario as a before and an after, surely that implies Olga’s life as a woman revolving around a man. Then it can act as depiction of nuances of social traditions such as marriage and the nuclear family.

Mario acted liked a complete asshole throughout the entire novel. No character redemption for this guy. In fact, the narrator-protagonist, Olga never receives as apology from his end. He leaves his family, leaves Olga all familial obligations and duties until he feels ready? I thought adults were supposed to act mature or idk.

Moreover, the mother-daughter relationship between Ilaria and Olga is worth analyzing. Ilaria starts to mirror Olga, questioning what womanhood could look like. She nurtures her sick brother. She is also an agent of reality check on Olga, for with paper cut scratches she Olga, as Olga is perceived out of reality, in her own internal thoughts. A younger human is a temporality check on her mother. This is important; it portrays the need of an adult for grounding, asking her pre-adolescent child to help ground Olga’s disassociation. Of course a mimetic subversion of the child seeking grounding lessons from their guardian. Moreover, Olga’s projection of her fears projected onto her children is interesting. For Ilaria she fears she will take Carla as a role model. For Gianna  she fears he will be attracted to Carla.

Olga’s growth to self-sufficient by the end of the novel is inspiring. She is on a quest of self-reconstruction.

I know we are supposed to talk about the novels diegetically, but I will mention anyway… Domenico Starstone’s novel Ties seems to be a counterpart novel, albeit written by a different novelist other than Elena Ferrante (that we know of). The storyline is almost identical, both stories shared under a different perspective.

Question: Is this then a novel about human psychology and how human emotional states manifest according to the identity it affects?

 

 

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Making sense of the world after losing your compass

Posted on September 25, 2026 by qtoca

This was depressing. In a bad way? No, I wouldn’t say so. However, the length of her struggles really made you, as a reader, feel exhausted along with her. Despite that, I think it was a narrative that was necessary to share and a tale that need not just be read by women, but understood by the opposite sex as well.

The story of loss and abandonment reminded me of the statistics I learned during one of my psychology courses; I think it was called the Parental Investment Theory, where the biological investment women have to put in is way higher, so women are psychologically more invested in their parenting, whereas men can easily leave or put less care without big consequences. They can just “hit it and quit it.”

Take Mario for example, it was horrifying to me that he was able to abandon all responsibilities of bills and children on Olga just because he “fell in love,” even telling her that they have to see the children less because Carla was stressed (p. 185); did it not occur to him that Olga was in the same heck, even worse, position? When women go crazy, it’s not because they were from the beginning; something had driven them to that point. Can I even call it craziness? This word sounds like the incorrect one to use.

I argue that the choices women have to jump into to start a family and get married are far scarier than those of men. Olga’s outbursts, resentment towards her children, and mental cloudiness are not because of an innate flaw in her parenting, but an imbalance in this parental investment. Age is another aspect of this investment that relates to this book; the good old “biological clock”. It seems to me the common theme between the books so far is the fear of losing to a younger, perkier woman, an insecurity that doesn’t affect males as much as it does females. Does this need to reproduce matter more than the responsibility of taking care/responsibility of someone you’ve loved and grown with for years longer?

There was another quote that struck me:

Women without love lose the light in their eyes, women without love die while they are still alive. (p. 44)

Is this not the same for men? There is this theory I heard that men fall fast and slowly fall out of passion while women slowly build up their love towards their partner. Is it because of this that some men lose sight of what they were trying to build with their partner? When women build their life around their lover, the risk of becoming the poverella becomes scarily near despite all vows to not be like other “simple-minded women.” All of us want to be “…women of invincible words…” (p. 21), but can this happen without the need to renounce love?

Why is love a tool used against women? Why has it been marketed so that it is a necessary indicator of success in our lives? This book has made me think a lot about the dehumanisation and humiliation of the self when it comes to loving someone else.

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Good morning, my name is…

Posted on September 25, 2026 by Amada Libertad

Hi everyone, I am joining the party a bit late. This is my introductory post.

My name is Valeria. I am in my first year of my Master’s program in Hispanic studies. I am originally from El Salvador (Kuskatan) and moved to Vancouver 8 years ago to do my undergraduate studies at UBC (Political Science and Latin American studies).

My interests (I am currently researching) are the intersections between memory, education, family, and gang-violence in the context of new authoritarianisms in Central America (specifically El Salvador). My other non-academic interests include (but are not limited to) sewing (still learning) as a part of multi-media diy projects, cooking, bike riding, swimming (still learning), and writing bad poetry.

I tend to not have that many expectations for any of my classes. I think there is a creative and surprising aspect that is taken away if you have too many expectations. However, for this particular class, what excites me is the fact that I will be forced to only read women’s writings/ideas. In an environment where we unconsciously tend to gravitate to reading only men’s authors (as it was my case in the last RMS 520 class I took, reading Bolaño and Monge), I am curious to see what different themes this space/class will force us to talk about in contrast to other courses.

Can I find more connections between all the books I am reading in this class just because the authors are all women? What do they have in common beyond that? Are the books more emotional? Are the books talking more about men? Are the books talking more about women? How do women portray men? Do they do it the same way men portray women? Is it helpful to focus on gender when reading their novels? Do I change as a reader when I read novels crafted by women?

How discussions of intersectionality or social locations can fit in this space/class?

I do have a lot of questions entering this class. I hope to answer a few once we reach the end.

I am curious to read your blogs and see what are your thoughts on these questions. If you wouldn’t mind I would love to hear some of your ideas regarding one or more of these questions in the comments. What do you think so far?

I guess the other important reflection is that it is not just any women’s writers, it is women’s writers in the 21st century. What themes are women in the 21st century talking about that other women writers in other generations were not able to name? Or how do they name it differently?

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

Posted on September 24, 2026 by xuekun jiang

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.

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The Days of Abandonment: She had me in the first half not gonna lie

Posted on September 24, 2026 by kcauchon

I sadly read this book in more than one sitting (it was around 5), so my thoughts are quite disconnected.

Reading the first half of this book, I was really following the arc of Olga’s loss. Her feelings and actions all seemed completely valid to me after experiencing such a betrayal. I think where this book really lost me was when she attacked Mario and Carla in the street. Although it was satisfying seeing her lash out, and they definitely deserved it. This scene marked a turning point where Olga’s thoughts became actions. And from this point forward, the narration took on a more abstract form. I definitely had some difficulty with this book, given that it takes on a much less straightforward form than I am used to reading. Especially the climactic middle chunk where they are stuck in the apartment. But that does have something to say about form and function. How does the strange narration during the climax aid to further the narrative? We lose the plot from here until they are freed from the apartment. But I think this reflects how Olga loses herself. It isn’t a strictly linear process, but she does hold herself together (more or less), and falls apart more and more until the climax.

This book does have a lot for overlap with The Possession. The feelings of obsession with “The Other Woman” and comparison and how losing a man feels like they’ve lost a part of themselves. I think this book takes it one step further by depicting less of the reality, and more of the feeling. Olga goes, in the nicest way possible and by no fault of her own, completely off the rails. Neglecting her family and pursuing sex with Carrano were, in my opinion, bad choices. But these choices reflect how she was feeling. She was put into an impossible situation, having to care for her family and her household all while processing the ultimate betrayal.

It is also in contrast with Ernaux’s story, where her jealousy was more or less contained to herself. The worst thing she did was call every number of the couple’s apartment building. This is not to say that the things Olga did were unjustified. In her situation, I think displaying any more composure would be lying. Both stories show an honesty to oneself, holding no pretense that they were doing well. This pretense was reserved for others. And in Olga’s case, it seemed it was when she started to heal towards the end that she was able to tell people about her husband’s betrayal, without pretending that she was fine.

Overall, I don’t quite know what to think of this story! It had me at some points and lost me at others, so it’s hard to form a cohesive opinion. I am, however, glad that this course gave me a reason to read such a book, since it is absolutely not something I would ever pick up myself. I am very much looking forward to the class’s discussion to see what everyone has to say!

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"The Days of Abandonment" by Ferrante: Spiraling

Posted on September 24, 2026 by Sydney Hyndman

Upon reading this story, the first thought that came to mind is: have the books we've read so far essentially been intense depictions of what many individuals experience in daily life? In the case of The Possession, don't we all get a little jealous after a finding out about our ex-partner's replacement? And in the case of this novel, don't we all start to feel a little down after someone abruptly leaves us? Notice how I say little - as I do believe these books are extreme illustrations of the emotions than many humans experience in their lifetime.

Right when the book opened, and I read the line "One April afternoon, right after lunch, my husband announced that he wanted to leave me" (p.9), I thought to myself, here we go again, another story of doom and despair. And that's essentially what I got: to watch a woman experience one of the lowest points of her life. It hurt to read, honestly, as I watched Olga's life spin into a whirlwind of misery. Her son's sickness, animal neglect (Otto), ant infestation, physically attacking her ex and his new girl, her broken phone line, and sexual failure with Carrano - it just kept getting worse. 

I think the line "Daddy wouldn’t have killed it, he would have taken it by the tail and carried it out to the park" (p.29) was sort of representative of how both the children, and Olga, felt about the situation. On the one hand, the children are young, and lack the ability to understand the complexity of what their mother is going through. But to see her kill a creature, and contrast that action with that of their father, implies that they understand something has gone wrong? And I can imagine from Olga's perspective that a comment like this would only make her feel worse, and push her lower than she already is.

Overall, I can't help but draw quite a few similarities between The Possession and The Days of Abandonment. Both capture the "female rage" experience, both are written in a raw style, and both trace periods of intense despair, then eventually develop into the protagonists' moving forward from their tragic eras. I actually enjoy this type of story, as it is direct and dramatic. If the rest of the books we rend take on similar characteristics, I am excited! 

The photo that I have chosen to represent this novel strives to represent both Olga's suffering and her internal overcoming of pain. In the image, we can see the arrows as illustrating the hardships that ensued following the end of her relationship with Mario. However, we can also see the glowing flower that she is holding, representing the power she possesses to take her life back.

My question for the class: do you think that The Possession and The Days of Abandonment serve as "extreme" representations of ordinary emotions that are experienced by numerous people?



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