My Week in Books – 16th April 2023

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MyWeekinBooksOn What Cathy Read Next last week

Tuesday – This week’s Top Ten Tuesday topic was Books With Animals In Their Title/On Their Cover.

Wednesday – As always WWW Wednesday is a weekly opportunity to share what I’ve just read, what I’m currently reading and what I plan to read next… and to take a peek at what others are reading. 

Thursday – I published my review of historical mystery, The Sinner’s Mark by S. W. Perry.

Friday – My #FlashbackFriday post saw me revisit my Buchan of the Month Reading Challenge from 2018.

Saturday – I shared my review of Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes. 

New arrivals

Voices of the DeadVoices of the Dead (Raven, Fisher & Simpson #4) by Ambrose Parry (eARC, Canongate via NetGalley)

1854 marks the dawn of a scientific age. Queen Victoria delivers a healthy heir after receiving chloroform during labour. Florence Nightingale makes headlines as she leads a troop of middle-class women out into the war zones as nurses. In Edinburgh, we see Henry Littlejohn appointed as the city’s police surgeon, dubbing himself as the ‘medical detective’, investigating sudden deaths – whether accidental or intentional.

Never has there been a time where people have been so enthralled by possibilities of science, but this appetite for the amazing is also being fed by a new generation of showmen and magicians, whose invention and ingenuity leave the public often unable to distinguish between the wonders of technology and the art of illusion.

Several mesmeric hospitals pop up in Edinburgh, claiming remarkable cures and offering egalitarian training for men and women. While the medical establishment remains sceptical, Dr James Young Simpson has an open mind, dabbling in seances to give this niche study a fair chance. Having faced discrimination from the medical field on the basis of gender, Sarah Fisher sees the hospitals as a place for opportunity.

Great danger lies in the shadowlands between science and superstition, between genuine medical progress and cynical quackery, thus setting the stage for a grand and deadly illusion.

On What Cathy Read Next this week

Currently reading

Planned posts

  • Book Review: The Chosen by Elizabeth Lowry 
  • Book Review: Rivers of Treason by K. J. Maitland
  • Blog Tour/Book Review: No Place To Hide by J. S. Monroe

#BookReview Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes

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Elizabeth FinchAbout the Book

Elizabeth Finch was a teacher, a thinker, an inspiration.

Neil is just one of many who fell under her spell during his time in her class. Tasked with unpacking her notebooks after her death, Neil encounters once again Elizabeth’s astonishing ideas on the past and on how to make sense of the present.

But Elizabeth was much more than a scholar. Her secrets are waiting to be revealed . . . and will change Neil’s view of the world forever.

Format: Paperback (192 pages)              Publisher: Viking
Publication date: 23rd February 2023 Genre: Contemporary Fiction, Literary Fiction

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My Review

This was a book club pick and I’ll be honest, based on the lukewarm reviews, it’s one I probably wouldn’t have prioritised to read despite the fact I enjoyed the author’s earlier book, The Sense of an Ending.

The first part of the book introduces us to the rather intimidating, intellectually rigorous Elizabeth Finch. As she states to her students, ‘I am not employed to help you… I am here to assist you to think and argue and develop minds of your own’.  Her credo can perhaps be summed up as ‘question everything’. Her heroes, if she would ever have such a thing, are those willing to challenge established beliefs.  ‘Apostates are the representatives of doubt, and doubt – vivid doubt – is the sign of an active intelligence.’

Intellectually, Neil is in awe of Elizabeth and he retains his admiration for her even after she is no longer his teacher. They start to meet regularly for lunch, always arranged with Elizabeth’s trademark precision. He is eager to please her and rejoices when their discussions over lunch leave him feeling cleverer: ‘I knew more, I was more cogent’.

The book’s second section consists of a lengthy essay on the life of Julian the Apostate, the last pagan Emperor of Rome. Is the choice of subject matter, I wondered, evidence of the author’s own interest in this historical figure, a mere coincidence that they share a first name or something intended to have more significance? Written by Neil, the essay is based on Elizabeth’s notebooks and other papers which he has inherited following her death. In doing so, he believes he’s carrying out her wishes, that gifting him her library and a reading list was ‘the clearest of signals’.  It’s also perhaps his way of demonstrating that, having drifted from job to job and had a number of failed relationships, he is not after all ‘King of the Unfinished Projects’ as he has been dubbed by one of his daughters. However, in constructing the essay based on Elizabeth’s notes, does Neil end up writing a simulacrum rather than something original based on his own ideas and sources. Surely even Elizabeth’s ideas should be questioned?

Neil remains curious, almost obsessively so, about Elizabeth’s life. Although referencing lines from one of C. P. Cavafy’s poems – ‘From what I did and what I said, Let them not seek to find who I was’ – in fact that’s effectively what Neil sets out to do.  He questions Elizabeth’s brother, Christopher, about her childhood and her relationship with their parents, whilst at the same time persisting in declaring he is not writing her biography. Anna, one of his former classmates, has her own theory about the reasons for his curiosity. Tantalisingly, Neil never gets to the bottom of several mysteries about Elizabeth’s life but very likely she would have hated it if he’d done so. And perhaps we can never really know another person.

Elizabeth Finch is a novel of ideas rather than plot but the more I reflected on it the more I appreciated its subtleties.

In three words: Thoughtful, nuanced, philosophical

JulianBarnesAbout the Author

Julian Barnes is the author of thirteen novels, including The Sense of an Ending, which won the 2011 Booker Prize for Fiction, and Sunday Times bestsellers The Noise of Time and The Only Story. He has also written three books of short stories, four collections of essays and three books of non-fiction, including the Sunday Times number one bestseller Levels of Life and Nothing To Be Frightened Of, which won the 2021 Yasnaya Polyana Prize in Russia. In 2017 he was awarded the Légion d’honneur.

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