2023-05-17 17:51:52
It starts deliciously, Elizabeth Finch, because it begins with the sketch of a captivating and mysterious character, one of those overtures that put the reader on high alert -because, who knows, this could be one of the great Barnes, he thinks-. Who is Elizabeth Finch? That is the question? If that’s it, Julian Barnes (Leicester, United Kingdom, 1946) begins his most recent book by beginning to answer it, and the words are not chosen at random: beginning to answer it.
EF, we learn, she is a teacher, she smokes a lot, she has a clear and serene voice and intellectually she is granite: free and owner of her ideas. “As a general rule, be careful what the majority aspires to“, he says at the beginning of the book. Of course, Barnes seduces us with his sketch.
We know that we are dealing with a character novel, and that the character, it seems, is based on solid foundations. But not. That (who is Elizabeth Finch?) is not the question.
One of the great heroes of EF – the greatest, perhaps – is Julian the Apostatethe last pagan emperor: the one who with his defeat, proclaims our heroine in class, marked the unfortunate turn of Europe towards gray, guilty and retrograde Christianity.
Well, what happens is that from a certain point we begin to understand that in Elizabeth Finch the Apostate is no less a protagonist than Finch herself. Is the story of the virtuous emperor a mirror where we should see his story reflected? We start to believe so. We begin to believe, we begin to understand: again, the verb is not chosen at random.
Marshy ground
The ground is no longer solid, it is swampy, and creates the strange effect of permanent start, or permanent sketch. It is suggested, it is always suggested. Play Barnes with the ambiguity. We like EF but we never quite got to know it, we like the Apostate but we don’t quite place him in the building of the novel, beyond the fact that he is the protagonist’s favorite. And so, the work begins to generate discomfort. What is not well resolved generates discomfort.
Perhaps it was Barnes’s intention, and it is hard to doubt that, given his experience. But that it was his intention means nothing. There is something unresolved in Elizabeth Finch, or rather, the sensation of something unresolved, and it is a pity, because the novel has great successes, such as the choice of the narrator, Neila student in his class culture and civilization who falls platonically in love with her.
The relationship they build, around a date to eat that is repeated for decades, always at the same time and always in the same restaurant, the cultivation of that love pregnant with admiration, the prolongation of the teacher/student relationship towards the personal territory, all of this is admirably constructed, with the sensitivity that such a delicate material requires.
The search that Neil undertakes after the death of his friend is also captivating, because it is the exploration from which a man in love hopes to extract the secrets that were stolen from him in his day: a heartfelt search, in which each discovery is wrapped in cloth and jealously kept in a drawer.
We are old enough to wait anxiously for closed endings, for everything to fall into place and for all the threads to come together in a vibrant last page. It’s not about that. But the feeling of unfinished does not do this novel any good. Rather, it seems imperfect.
‘Elizabeth Finch’
Julian Barnes
Translation by Inga Pellisa
Anagram
200 pages
18,90 euros
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