There is an ironic sense in which the narrator sucks the life out of Lila, while implying Lila has done the same to her. I don’t want to give spoilers, but as is already clear from this review so far, the dichotomy is set up from the very beginning of these novels of the two main characters – would Lila have told the same story? Part of me thinks that it wouldn’t have been unreasonable for Lila to have regretted having ever met the narrator. We are told this story through the eyes of the scholar – but with all novels, we should wonder how being told this story by any of the other characters might have changed the story. And finally, the majority, the self-excluded, those who know that the choices that exist beyond those that have been the forced choices they have already made are for things that are ‘not for the likes of us’. Then the autodidact whose intellectual and cultural life is a series of missteps and byways that too often lead nowhere, certainly not to the depth of knowledge they think pursuing their own path will provide, and even when successful, can never be assured in their knowledge. The scholar who desperately wants to be the gentleman, but who has been relegated to having learned culture through books and study, rather than through lived experience, and so can never feel the assured naturalness that they come to believe is the true measure of taste. All of his ‘characters’ are here – the gentlemen who are born into and therefore live and breathe culture and thus have a naturalness to the life of the mind that is impossible to hide, not least since there is rarely any need to hide it. Large parts of this book could have been written by Bourdieu. But, I think rather than one being all good and the other all evil, this is a story of a tragic divide in good and bad luck. A major theme throughout here is that the narrator is only ever truly successful when she develops the ideas of her double. The two girls are, at least in the mind of the narrator, incomplete without the other. I couldn’t help thinking of this story the entire time I was reading these novels. Both the Italian and Turkish sides of the war get hold of the respective halves of his body and, through the wonders of medicine (and fairy-tales) both halves are brought back to life: one side all good, the other side all bad. It is about a Knight who goes off to fight in Turkey, I think – although, part of me thinks that might be wrong – anyway, he gets hit by an enemy cannon ball that literally splits him in two. I have only read it once and that was a very long time ago. There is a Calvino novella called The Cloven Knight.

L'amica geniale by Elena Ferrante