How do I know?

 I started another Ferrante book today; I could tell from the first few pages that it was much better written. This made me think, though, that I have no right to make these judgments at all. I don't know Italian well enough.  But I do make these calls all the time. 

It could be that I am delusional, that I cannot really tell at all, but I think I must be responding to something in the text. Lila gives the narrator a box with 8 notebooks. The narrator begins to read and describes the contents of the notebooks. I am immediately drawn in, curious to know what it in there, who Lila is, what the relation between the two women is.  

You could say that I can tell the difference because I am a literature professor, and you wouldn't be wrong, but I think I could do this when I was 15 too.  Not in Italian of course, but in French or English for sure. You could say it's because this is what it means to be a reader in the first place: the ability to derive intense pleasure from great writing.