He forms something of a friendship with EF and then, when she passes, finds himself bequeathed her notebooks, leading him to wonder as to whether he should try to capture this unique woman in written form. Rigorous, passionate, a little eccentric, Finch, or EF, as Neil calls her, is a magnetic teacher who he becomes intellectually besotted with. And as I write those words, I stop, because I hear in my head something she once taught us in class: ‘And remember, whenever you see a character in a novel, let alone a biography or history book, reduced and neatened into three adjectives, always distrust that description.’”Įlizabeth Finch is a lecturer of history, and Neil takes her class as an adult student. “She was outside of her age in many ways ‘Do not be taken in by time,’ she once said, ‘and imagine that history – and especially intellectual history – is linear.’ She was high-minded, self-sufficient, European. It’s Barnes, after all, he won’t let me down. When I saw that my local secondhand bookshop had a rather neat copy of Julian Barnes’ latest novel Elizabeth Finch, I picked it up more or less without thinking or even reading the blurb. But this leaves me in a strong position for picking up titles on a whim. I don’t keep up with any author religiously, and am not a constant reader of any particular author if I’ve read every book by a given writer then they don’t have many books. It’s a pleasure to have old favourites to fall back upon.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |