Elizabeth Finch - Hardcover

Barnes, Julian

 
9780593535431: Elizabeth Finch
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 059353543X ISBN 13: 9780593535431
Verlag: Alfred a Knopf Inc, 2022

Inhaltsangabe

From the best-selling, award-winning author of The Sense of an Ending, a magnetic tale that centers on the presence of a vivid and particular woman, whose loss becomes the occasion for a man’s deeper examination of love, friendship, and biography.

"I’ll remember Elizabeth Finch when most other characters I’ve met this year have faded." –John Self, The Times

This beautiful, spare novel of platonic unrequited love springs into being around the singular character of the stoic, exacting Professor Elizabeth Finch. Neil, the narrator, takes her class “Culture and Civilisation,” taught not for undergraduates but for adults of all ages; we are drawn into his intellectual crush on this private, withholding, yet commanding woman. While other personal relationships and even his family drift from Neil’s grasp, Elizabeth’s application of her material to the matter of daily living remains important to him, even after her death, in a way that nothing else does.
 
In Elizabeth Finch, we are treated to everything we cherish in Barnes: his eye for the unorthodox forms love can take between two people, a compelling swerve into nonfictional material (this time, through Neil’s obsessive study of Julian the Apostate, following on notes Elizabeth left for him to discover after her death), and the forcefully moving undercurrent of history, and biography in particular, as nourishment and guide in our current lives.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

JULIAN BARNES is the author of twenty-four previous books, for which he has received the Man Booker Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Prix Médicis and Prix Femina in France, and the Jerusalem Prize. In 2017 he was awarded the Légion d’honneur. His work has been translated into more than forty languages. He lives in London.

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ONE

She stood before us, without notes, books or nerves. The lectern was occupied by her handbag. She looked around, smiled, was still, and began.

“You will have observed that the title of this course is ‘Culture and Civilisation.’ Do not be alarmed. I shall not be pelting you with pie charts. I shall not attempt to stuff you with facts as a goose is stuffed with corn; this would only lead to an engorged liver, which would be unhealthy. Next week I shall supply you with a reading list which is entirely optional; you will neither lose marks for ignoring it, nor gain them by relentless study. I shall teach you as the adults you undoubtedly are. The best form of education, as the Greeks knew, is collaborative. But I am no Socrates and you are not a classroom of Platos, if that is the correct plural form. Nonetheless, we shall engage in dialogue. At the same ?­time—­and since you are no longer in primary ?­school—­I shall not dispense milksop encouragement and bland approval. For some of you, I may well not be the best teacher, in the sense of the one most suited to your temperament and cast of mind. I mention this in advance to those for whom it will be the case. Naturally, I hope you will find the course interesting, and, indeed, fun. Rigorous fun, that is. The terms are not incompatible. And I shall expect rigour from you in return. Winging it will not suit. My name is Elizabeth Finch. Thank you.”

And she smiled again.

None of us had taken a note. We gazed back at her, some in awe, a few in puzzlement bordering on irritation, others already half in love.

I can’t remember what she taught us in that first lesson. But I knew obscurely that, for once in my life, I had arrived at the right place.

Her clothes. Let’s start at ground level. She wore brogues, black in winter, brown suede in autumn and spring. Stockings or ?­tights—­you never saw Elizabeth Finch with bare legs (and you certainly couldn’t imagine her in beachwear). Skirts just below the ?­knee—­she resisted the annual hemline tyranny. Indeed, she appeared to have settled on her look some time ago. It could still be called stylish; another decade, and it might be antique or, perhaps, vintage. In summer, a ?­box-?­pleated skirt, usually navy; tweed in winter. Sometimes she adopted a tartan or kiltish look with a big silver safety pin (no doubt there’s a special Scottish word for it). Obvious money was spent on blouses, in silk or fine cotton, often striped, and in no way translucent. Occasionally a brooch, always small and, as they say, discreet, yet somehow refulgent. She rarely wore earrings (were her lobes even pierced? now there’s a question). On her left little finger, a silver ring which we took to be inherited, rather than bought or given. Her hair was a kind of sandy grey, shapely and of unvarying length. I imagined a regular fortnightly appointment. Well, she believed in artifice, as she told us more than once. And artifice, as she also observed, was not incompatible with truth.

Though ?­we—­her ?­students—­were between our late twenties and early forties, we at first responded to her like kids back at school. We wondered about her background and her private life, about why and whether she had ?­never—­as far as we ?­knew—­married. About what she did in the evenings. Did she make herself a perfect fines herbes omelette, have a single glass of wine (Elizabeth Finch drunk? only if the world turned upside down) while reading the latest fascicle of Goethe Studies??? You see how easy it was to stray into fantasy, even satire.

She smoked all the years I knew her. And again, she didn’t smoke like anyone else. There are smokers who patently enjoy every burst of nicotine; others who inhale with a sense of ?­self-?­loathing; some display it as a style habit; others again, annoyingly, claim to have “only one or two a day,” as if they were in charge of their addiction. ?­And—­since all smokers ?­lie—“one or two” always turns out to mean three or four, even half a pack. EF, on the other hand, displayed no attitude to her smoking. It was something she did which required neither explanation nor ornamentation. She decanted her cigarettes into a tortoiseshell case, which left us playing Guess the Brand. She smoked as if she were indifferent to smoking. Does that make sense? And if you had dared to ask her, she wouldn’t have fallen back on excuses. Yes, she would have said, of course she was addicted; and yes, she knew it was bad for her, and also antisocial. But no, she wasn’t going to stop, or count how many she smoked a day; such matters were very low on her list of concerns. And ?­since—­this was my own personal deduction, or rather, ?­guess—­since she had no fear of death and nowadays judged life somewhat overrated, the question was really of no interest to her, and therefore shouldn’t be to you either.

Naturally, she suffered migraines.

In my mind’s ?­eye—­my memory’s eye, the only place I can see ?­her—­she is standing before us, preternaturally still. She had none of those lecturer’s tics and tricks designed to charm, distract, or indicate character. She never waved her arms about or supported her chin in her hand. She might occasionally put a slide up to illustrate a point, but that was mostly unnecessary. She commanded attention by her stillness and her voice. It was a calm, clear voice enriched by decades of smoking. She wasn’t one of those teachers who only engaged with their students when they looked up from their notes because, as I said, she didn’t lecture from notes. It was all in her head fully ?­thought ­out, fully processed. This also compelled attention, reducing the gap between her and us.

Her diction was formal, her sentence structure entirely ?­grammatical—­indeed, you could almost hear the commas, semicolons and full stops. She never started a sentence without knowing how and when it would end. Yet she never sounded like a talking book. Her vocabulary was drawn from the same ?­word-?­box she used for both writing and general conversation. And yet the effect wasn’t archaic in any way, it was intensely alive. And she ?­enjoyed—­perhaps to amuse herself, or to surprise ?­us—­throwing in the occasional phrase of a different tonality.

For instance, one week she was talking to us about The Golden Legend, that medieval assemblage of miracles and martyrdoms. Gaudy miracles and instructive martyrdoms. Her subject was St. Ursula.

“Cast your minds back, if you will, to ad 400, a time before Christian hegemony had been established on our shores. Ursula was a British princess, daughter of the Christian King Nothus. She was wise, dutiful, devout and ?­virtuous—­all the usual moral accoutrements of such princesses. Also beautiful, that more problematic accoutrement. Prince Etherius, son of the King of Anglia, fell in love with her and asked for her hand in marriage. This placed Ursula’s father in a dilemma, since the Angles were not only very powerful, but also worshippers of idols.

“Ursula was a bride to be bartered, like many before and since; and being wise, virtuous, et cetera, she was also ingeni­ous. Accept the offer from the son of Power, she told her father; yet attach conditions which will impose delay. Ask to be granted three years of grace, so that Ursula could make a pilgrimage to Rome, during which time young Etherius was to be instructed in the true faith and then baptised. Some might judge this a...

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Verlag
Alfred a Knopf Inc
Erscheinungsdatum
2022
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
059353543X
ISBN 13 
9780593535431
Einband
Gebundene Ausgabe
Anzahl der Seiten
179
Kontakt zum Hersteller
Knopf
https://knopfdoubleday.com

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