I was determined not to like it.

Everyone in my building was reading these. That put me off for two years. Then someone left a copy in the laundry room and I took it as a sign, or as a free book, which is the same than a sign when you're between books.

First irritation: the index of characters at the front. Six families, every name listed, the shoemaker and his sons and so on. I felt I'd been handed homework before the first page. I've since decided it's there because Ferrante wants you to feel the neighbourhood as a fixed set of people you can't escape, which is exactly what the girls feel, but on day one it just made me tired.

Second irritation, which lasted about forty minutes: the narration. Lenù is not a reliable person about herself. She tells you she's the plodder and Lila is the genius, and she keeps telling you, and meanwhile she's the one who studies, who passes, who gets out, who is writing this. It took me a while to notice how much of her humility is a way of not being blamed for anything. Once I saw that — and it took me most of the first part — the book became much better, and much colder.

The dialect question is where I got properly interested. Ferrante mostly doesn't write in Neapolitan. She writes in Italian and then tells you when a character has switched into dialect, so the marker does the work and the reader supplies the sound. Ann Goldstein keeps those markers flat and unfussy in English. Celia Filipetto in Spanish has the harder job, because Spanish readers arrive with their own ideas about what a rough register sounds like and there's a temptation to reach for something regional. She resists it. Both translations resist it. I think they're right and I also think something goes missing, and nothing can be done, and that's translation.

The fireworks on New Year's Eve, where the two families compete by firing rockets across the roofs until it stops being a celebration and turns into something else, is the scene I'd put in front of anyone who asked what this novel actually does. Nobody explains it. Everybody understands it. Rino comes down the stairs afterwards and the evening has changed permanently and not one line of dialogue says so.

The shoes. Lila's shoes are the best object in a novel I've read in years. A pair of shoes as ambition, as a family's whole future, as a thing that can be given away by other people. Everything that happens in the last part happens through them.

Eight. The two points I'm keeping back are for the middle, where the book becomes a list of who did what to whom in which family and I lost my footing several times. Also for the ending, which stops rather than ends, because it's the first of four.

Book two has been on the shelf since March. I'll get to it. That's what I said in March.