I didn’t mean to buy this book. I needed one as a gift. I chose the right book from the buy one get one half price table in Waterstones and obviously I then needed to buy the second book. Nothing in particular caught my eye until I saw the name Julian Barnes. Anything written by him is trustworthy and Elizabeth Finch is a new publication.
This is one of the strangest pieces of writing I have read in a long time. Elizabeth is a teacher of English and of Ancient Civilisation. Her lectures profoundly affect the thinking of her students, widely and deeply.
After her death, one of her students finds that she has left him all her notebooks and papers. There is great apprehension as to what he is supposed to do with them. Was she relying on him to destroy everything or the total opposite, to archive them. Maybe he is supposed to realise that there is enough material here for a biography. How would this be framed? Would he be able to do this strange, illustrious thinker justice?
The ex-student Neil, finds that his whole view of the world, his ideas about love, war and grief are changed as he reads through Elizabeth Finch’s notebooks. Her ideas on the past and how these impact on how we make any sense of the present feel original and as is well known, original thought is truly rare.
I have recently been reading a history by Peter Frankopan of The Silk Roads and so these few lines really resonated with me:
‘Why should we expect our collective memory – which we call history – to be any less fallible than our personal memory?’
This is the question that EF (as she’s called throughout the book) poses to her inhibited, tongue tied class of young adults. She wants them to ponder on the nature of history, something that maybe they don’t feel intellectually confident in doing.
Read this book, it is under 200 pages, if you feel like a challenge and want something very well written and decidedly different. In the blurb a reviewer for The Times says: ’I’ll remember Elizabeth Finch when most other characters I’ve met this year have faded.’ I know where he is coming from as I find myself still thinking about her and the book although I have already read 3 or 4 stories since then. I feel I will read it again at some point. Is there a line of irony there that I missed? It is complicated … but well worth a chunk of your reading time.