Like bookish people everywhere, I've been devouring the fourth and final installment of the pseudonymous Elena Ferrante's Neapolitan quartet, The Story of the Lost Child, which was published this month. Critics have praised the series for being one of the most sustained, nuanced explorations of a fictional female friendship of all time. While reading Ferrante, it's hard to ignore that other European writer of multi-volume novels that may or may not be autobiographical, Karl Ove Knausgaard, author of the six-volume My Struggle series. Since Ferrante's series and Knausgaard's have been published contemporaneously, critics can't stop churning out think pieces about the two. Almost every review of The Story of the Lost Child mentions Knausgaard.
Many of the comparisons inevitably make much of the fact that Ferrante is a woman and Knausgaard is a man. Joshua Rothman of The New Yorker recently asked "What’s at stake when we opt for snow over sun, anger over awkwardness, herring over prosciutto, women over men, the north over the south, 1955 over 1985? What does our preference for Knausgaard or Ferrante suggest about us?" Rothman's essay explores an interesting question, but it made me wonder, why does everyone note the gender divide? Why does it matter that the Neapolitan novels are ostensibly authored by a woman (though some have questioned this) and My Struggle by a man?
It matters because we still live in a world where an author's gender shapes readers' expectations and reactions. If Ferrante and Knausgaard are so similar--Rothman goes as far as to say that they are fundamentally interested in the same topic, fear--as to draw comparisons from anyone who has read the two, the differences in execution shed light on how gender circumscribes each author. And ultimately, it's how each author transcends these expectations that makes both Ferrante and Knausgaard great.
The major difference between Ferrante's work and Knausgaard's is how much more Ferrante's books feel like traditional novels. Take the plot for instance. In the Neapolitan series, the narrator, Elena Cerullo, reflects on the relationship between her and her closest friend, Lila Caracci, from girlhood through their professional lives. While Elena is allowed to pursue a high school education, Lila is not. This decision in the first volume of the series, My Brilliant Friend, shapes the rest of their lives. Each of the three subsequent volumes goes through a new phase of their lives: young adulthood, marriage, motherhood. There are love triangles, betrayals, and reversals of fortune. The plot of Knausgaard's six-volume series, My Struggle, is much easier to describe: it's just about a narrator--also named Karl Ove's--as he contemplates drinking, sex and writing. That's all you need to know since this describes 90% of the things that happen. While his work is ostensibly an autobiographical exploration of one man's journey through life--much like how the Neapolitan novels is one woman's journey--Knausgaard isn't interested in telling a story with a beginning middle and end. Each volume focuses on a period of his life and his experiences and memories. Half of the second volume, A Man in Love, takes place while Knausgaard makes one trip to the grocery store.
Second, Ferrante's novels seem to have required more work and thought on the part of the author. Her writing is more lyrical and deliberate. In contrast, Knausgaard seems to dump everything on the page. As William Deresiewicz pointed out in The Nation, "Knausgaard transcribes; Ferrante transforms. Her prose is wine to Knausgaard’s mop water." Here is Knausgaard on an early sexual encounter:
“We went into her tent. We sat down, she opened a bottle. We looked at each other. She made a grab for me, I made a grab for her, she lay down, I tore her T-shirt over her head and her breasts flopped out....I bent down and kissed her white thighs, stuck my nose in her black panties and at the same time stretched for her breasts with both hands, and then she said, get your clothes off, come on, hurry, hurry, I want you now, and I jumped up, dragged my T-shirt over my head and pulled down my trousers as I watched her wriggle out of her panties and lie there naked and raise her legs slightly as she parted them, and I could barely breathe...”
Here is Ferrante on an early sexual experience:
“His mouth was warm and wet, I welcomed it on mine with increasing gratitude, so that the kiss lasted longer and longer, his tongue grazed mine, collided with it, sank into my mouth...I had a hidden me—I realized—that fingers, mouth, teeth, tongue were able to discover. .Layer after layer, that me lost every hiding place, was shamelessly exposed, and [S] showed that he knew how to keep it from fleeing, from being ashamed, he knew how to told it as if it were the absolute reason for his affectionate motility, for his sometimes gentle, sometimes fevered pressures.”
While the passages begin the same way--with a rather banal account of foreplay--they end up in different places. Knausgaard continues to describe the encounter in detail while Ferrante provides reflective analysis.
Finally, Ferrante's main character pays more attention to others around her while Knausgaard turns entirely inward. She constantly describes her experiences in the context of others. She also fills us in on the lives of the minor characters. Indeed, each volume comes with an "Index of Characters" that is very helpful for when Elena randomly mentions what the shoemaker's son or the grocer's daughter is doing every now and then. The cast of characters in Karl Ove's world is pretty limited. There's his brother, his parents, and the two serious romantic partners in his life.
For a while I wondered if these contrasts showed how rude the publishing world is to women. Why is it that Knausgaard is allowed 3,000 pages of navel gazing stream of conscious while Ferrante writes an four-part epic with a plot? Perhaps women need to work in more traditional forms for their novels to be published. A common critique of Knausgaard is that a woman could never "get away" with so much navel gazing.
While all this may be true, both Ferrante and Knausgaard manage to simultaneously buck gender stereotypes while working within their given confines. Their ability to defy expectations will likely secure their places in the literary canon. Ferrante actually is writing about huge topics--not just "women's issues." While her main focus is on the relationship between Elena and Lila, she novels span four decades of change in Italy. The supporting characters from Elena's hometown of Naples become involved in the revolutionary spirit of the 1960s. One of Lila's later boyfriends becomes involved with a computing start-up supporting IMB computers in the 1970s. We realize that the Neapolitan novels are as much about a female friendship as it is about Italy's modernization.
Similarly, for all of Knausgaard's existential angst about the death of his father (Book 1), love (Book 2), and the process of becoming an adult (Book 4), Knausgaard writes about domestic--"women's"--issues often. The banality of life is his favorite subject. He is just as capable of waxing on about the tilt of his penis (Book 1) as he is about a child's birthday party Book 2). One of the most memorable passages of the four volumes published is a reflection on parenthood that we rarely see from male authors in fiction:
“When I pushed the stroller all over town and spent my days taking care of my child, it was not the case that I was adding something to my life, that it became richer as a result, on the contrary, something was removed from it, part of myself, the bit relating to masculinity...If I had wanted it otherwise I would have had to back out and tell Linda before she came pregnant: Listen, I want children, but I don’t want to stay at home looking after them, is that fine with you? Which means, of course, that you’re the one who will have to do it. Then she could have said no, it’s not fine with me, or, yes, that’s fine and our future could have been planned on that basis. But I didn’t, I didn’t have sufficient foresight, and consequently I had to go by the rules of the game. In the class and culture we belonged to, that meant adopting the same role, previously called the womans’s role. I was bound to it like Odysseus to the mast: if I wanted to free myself I could do that, but not without losing everything.”
Yes, Knausgaard is complaining about having to raise kids, but he's also addressing the age old woman's question of how to balance one's self identity withe being a parent.
Although I find both Ferrante and Knausgaard to be revelatory, I also find myself recommending Knausgaard to everyone while recommending Ferrante to mostly women. I tell myself, if a guy is going to only read one of these series, they might might find My Struggle more relateable. Perhaps it's attitudes like this that continue to foster gender stereotypes in literature. Perhaps one shouldn't make a choice between Ferrante and Knausgaard - just read both.