Tag: contemporary fiction

#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 #Ad Three Gifts by Mark A. Radcliffe @epoque_press

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Three Gifts Cover_FinalAbout the Book

If you could save the life of a loved one by trading in years of your own life, how many years would you give? How many lives could you save? Would you know when to stop?

Francis Broad has done just that and has negotiated the day of his death, now he must come to terms with the decisions he has made.

Three Gifts explores one man’s attempt to live a good life, his sense of responsibility, gratitude and what it means to love

Format: eARC (256 pages)                 Publisher: époque press
Publication date: 2nd March 2023 Genre: Contemporary Fiction

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My Review

I’ve read several books published by époque press – El Hacho and Ghosts of Spring by Luis Carrasco, The Wooden Hill by Jamie Guiney and Seek the Singing Fish by Roma Wells – and not been disappointed yet.  I’m pleased to say Three Gifts continues that pattern.

I loved the way the book explores family relationships and friendship.  The tender relationship between Francis and his mother, Rose, is movingly described as is the young Francis’s feeling of bewilderment and powerlessness when his mother becomes ill.  ‘This isn’t fair because there is nothing I can do, there is never anything I can do.’ A chance (or is it?) encounter offers him the opportunity to do the ‘something’ he’s been looking for –  to give his mother and himself a gift beyond value: more time together.  He has the same motivation many years later when a random event risks losing the person – besides his wife, Victoria – he holds most dear.

Francis’s friendship with Ben and Joy is the sort of friendship I think we’d all like to have. There’s fun and laughter, generosity and understanding. It was both wonderfully uplifting and, at certain points, intensely moving.  And having Francis be a gardener with a desire to plant trees that will take years to grow to their full height but will persist after he’s gone was a clever touch.

Francis’s ‘trade’ is an act of willing self-sacrifice. But is trading years of your own life to prolong another’s actually the gift you think it is? What if it means you don’t live to see them grow up or fulfil their potential? Would they want you to have entered into such a contract if they’d known the consequence was spending less time with you? How would you approach the final days, hours, minutes of your life if you knew the precise point at which it would end?

In case you think this is sounding all rather serious and worthy, there’s also a lot of wry observation and humour in the book. For example, an arduous pregnancy is described as being like ‘a physical assault by surrealist plumbers’ and an act of sexual intimacy being like ‘two people trying to put on the same duffel coat in the dark’.

Whether you believe the ‘contract’ Francis enters into, and the events that follow, are the product of divine intervention, fate or simply coincidence, Three Gifts prompts you to think about what you would do in the same situation.

Three Gifts is a beautifully written, gentle and heartfelt story. It’s a book that will make you smile, laugh, ponder and maybe shed a tear or two. Personally, I don’t ask much more from a story.

My thanks to Sean at époque press for my digital review copy.

In three words: Tender, moving, engaging

Mark A RatcliffeAbout the Author

Mark A. Radcliffe is the author of two novels, Gabriel’s Angel (2010) and Stranger Than Kindness (2013), both published by Bluemoose and a collection of short stories, Superpowers (2020) published by Valley Press.

He is currently the Subject Lead for Creative Writing at West Dean College of Art and Conservation. Prior to that he worked as a nurse, a health journalist/columnist and a senior lecturer in mental health practice and nursing.

Mark lives in Hove with his wife Kate and swims in the sea a lot.

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