Elizabeth Finch

I loved this book. I enjoyed the writer’s style of story-telling, mixing two different times in history; EF’s and Julian’s whilst bringing out the joy in both of them.
The story of EF and the obvious feelings of love and admiration our narrator felt for her was both ethereal and moving. There is something altogether joyful about the book and one I feel sure I will revisit.

Another excellent book by Julian Barnes.
Elizabeth Finch is an enigmatic lecturer who the narrator falls in love with. The love is what I would call Platonic love, but he calls it Romantic-Stoic.

The other main protagonist in this novel is Julian the Apostate, and it is not easy to see how these would fit together, but the master story blender does it almost seamlessly, and I wasn’t exactly sure how they fitted together until the last paragraph of the book.

It is a multi-layered book, by that I mean that it can be read as a simple tale or you can search for the deep meaningfulness within it.

Julian is one of the most erudite authors I read, and probably the only one that could make such a novel work, but it certainly worked for me.

I will be reading the book again and will probably find some things that I missed first time.

I read this book in two sittings, but if not started late at night it can be managed in one. I have read most of Julian’s novels, and after reading this one I will go back and read some of the ones that I have not yet read, and wait patiently for his next!

Julian Barnes is, to me, the writer of the quiet voice that resonates the longest. Long after I’ve closed the pages of one of his books, my thoughts remain with the protagonists of his books and the themes they represent. Two such unforgettable literary characters appear here, in Barnes’s thirteenth novel, and are Neil, a young philosopher, and Elizabeth, his deceased former lecturer whose notebooks he curates. Full of philosophical threads that somehow always run back to Roman Emperor Julian, later Julian the Apostate, who died in the year 363 but whom Elizabeth considered her soulmate and historical predecessor, this is a demanding but magical book that was a great joy to read. Warmly recommended – to the readership Barnes has already, and to new readers who wish to engage with philosophical thought.

I read this over two days and was constantly wanting to get back to it. By the end I am awestruck at the quality of Julian Banes writing and his scholarship.

He uses the tripartite device he used in ‘Levels of Life’. to create a structure allowing us to examine ideas and preconceptions in a nonheated version. Constantly changing and shifting the view/context to encourage a greater sense of ‘I hadn’t thought about it like that before.

The first and third sections focus on the life of Elizabeth Finch, the narrator’s perception of her and the final section shows how other saw her. Elizabeth Finch is an incredible construct, she is as credible and as magnetic as Elizabeth Strout’s Lucy Barton or the McPherson brothers in Kent Haruf’s Plainsong trilogy.

I must admit I’m a bit of a nerd, so I really enjoyed the middle section and the long essay on Julian the Apostate. Fantastic. In this section he creates an incredible feat of writing. It’s thought provoking and informative. The potential of an alternative world in which the alliance of Christianity and state had not happened.

On top of this you get quite a lot of philosophy! That makes it sound as if it is dry as a bone. It certainly isn’t. The writing is luminous, the characters are immensely appealing and human, and you are constantly bombarded with new things to think about and take on board. Julian Barnes creates an important sense of truth and questioning in a fictional novel.

I really enjoyed this and would heartily recommend it. In fact, although I received a free copy via NetGalley I will be buying copies for friends when it is published.