Tag: book club

#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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#BookReview The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

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The Vanishing HalfAbout the Book

Stella and Desiree are identical twins, growing up together in a small, Southern black community. Until, at age sixteen, they run away…

Years later, everything about their lives is different: their families, communities and racial identities. One sister lives with her black daughter in the same Southern town she once tried to escape. The other secretly passes for white, and her husband knows nothing of her past. Still, separated by many miles and just as many lies, the fates of the twins remain intertwined. What will happen in the next generation, when their own daughters’ storylines intersect?

Format: Paperback (366 pages)    Publisher: Dialogue Books
Publication date: 17th June 2021 Genre: Historical Fiction

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My Review

Firstly, I have to thank Waterstones in Reading for choosing The Vanishing Half for their October book club and for finally making me pluck from it from my TBR pile!

Mallard, where the Vignes twins grow up, is described as ‘a strange town’. Isn’t it just? A town that doesn’t appear on any maps and where over the decades black people have attempted to become light-skinned, such that they can almost pass as white. I found Mallard an unsettling place with a rather dystopian feel about it.

Although I felt sorry for the traumatic events Desiree experiences, for me Stella’s story was the more compelling. Initially, her decision to pass as white seems to involve little more than bravado. ‘There was nothing to being white expect boldness. You could convince anyone you belonged somewhere if you acted like you did.’  However, as time goes by, it involves her telling more and more lies, to the point where she constantly fears being caught out and cannot face revealing the truth to anyone, including her husband and daughter, Kennedy.  It’s the lies more than anything else that eventually threaten her relationship with Kennedy.

My favourite character was Deisree’s daughter, Jude. I really felt for her growing up with dark skin in a town where this is the exception and the terrible racist abuse she experiences from schoolmates and others. ‘People thought that being one of a kind made you special. No, it just made you lonely.’ I was pleased when, later in the book, she forms a relationship that encompasses real tenderness and affection. I also loved Early, whose occupation involves tracking people down but who decides there are more important things than completing a commission. The care he shows for Desiree’s mother towards the end of the book was also really touching.

The book explores many themes, such as loneliness, poverty and discrimination. Common amongst many of the characters is that they have experienced being abandoned as children. However, I felt the overriding theme was identity.  Stella is the obvious example, reinventing herself as white whilst knowing that underneath she is black. ‘She’d always known that it was possible to be two different people in one lifetime, or maybe it was only possible for some. Maybe others were just stuck with who they were.’  There are other examples as well, such as Reese who chooses another identity from the one he was born with, Kennedy who is happiest when she is on a stage or film set and becoming another person, even Mallard itself in the end.

Not only is The Vanishing Half an enthralling story populated with skilfully drawn characters, but it offers many layers to unpick making it the perfect book club choice.

In three words: Powerful, thought-provoking, emotional

Try something similar: Passing by Nella Larsen (recently adapted for cinema)

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Brit BennettAbout the Author

Brit Bennett is the author of the New York Times bestselling novel The Mothers; a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle John Leonard Prize for the best first book, the PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Fiction and the New York Public Library Young Lions Fiction Award; and a National Book Foundation 5 under 35. Her work has been featured in the New Yorker, New York Times Magazine, Paris Review and Jezebel.

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