She agreed to marry him out of respect for keeping one’s word, out of respect for Yoro Ba. Penndo had come to love my father because he was her exact opposite. He was as old as an immutable landscape, she was young like the changing sky. He was immobile as a baobab tree, she was the daughter of the wind. Sometimes opposites fascinate each other because of the differences between them. Penndo had come to love my father, the old man, because he contained all of the wisdom of the earth and of the recurring seasons. My father, the old man, idolized Penndo because she was what he was not: movement, joyous instability, novelty.

The immensity is the story; the rest is situation. That this son must come into his own by making war not on a parent who is willful and self-involved (which he is) but on one filled with the tender regard that alone gives a growing creature the ability to declare itself (which he also is). This is the thing the reader is meant to register; this is the narrator’s wisdom. It is the betrayal of love that is required in order that one become.

The writing continues to dazzle while the structure falls apart. And rightly so. Because, after all, what difference does it really make—the second and third times around—which comes first? We are in the presence of a man in a trance of self-analysis: a man who will never act on what he knows and therefore is compelled to go on “knowing.

I remember a woman caught not in a triangle, but in a pen-tangle of new lover, old husband, children, her parents, and herself. They were all implicated in her love life, and each of them added pressure to the muddle. After a few years of struggle, she resolved the emotional geometry by discovering that she hadn’t been giving enough love to her own interests and abilities. Once her career blossomed, the other loves all took their highly original, unconventional places. It was a resolution she never could have imagined in the early days of her despair.

She was mesmerised by his focused intent, the combination of a strict work ethic with an unstructured moral code. While his subject was before him, they were all-important. ‘The aura given out by a person or an object is as much a part of them as their flesh,’ he once wrote. ‘The effect they make in space is as bound up with them as might be their colour or smell. The effect in space of two different individuals can be as different as the effect of a candle and a light bulb.’

Once Sophie had started an affair with Lucian, she too quickly realised that he was incapable of sticking to one sexual partner. ‘I was intensely involved but aware that other people were involved too. You don’t know things and just have to work them out. You’re not quite sure what’s going on. When Lucian was out of the room I would look at the paintings turned against the wall and see a bit more of someone’s breast. It would make me terribly jealous. He gave a lot of attention when you were there with him, but when you weren’t then you knew there was a whole other life happening. That was tough,’ she said.