Elizabeth Finch

Elizabeth Finch by Julian Barnes
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Rather disappointing.
The narrator - an adult with a family ( in a bit of the mess) and with established (very weekly) professional career, enrols to the course "Culture and civilisation".
From the first lecture he is under a spell of the lecturer - Elizabeth Finch.
She runs her lectures in quite inspiring way - presents shortly some story and encourages students to absolutely free discussion.
We got a very short list of discussed issues, the main concerns of the lecturer are love, happiness, some rarely known facts from the medieval times.
The main point is the fascination of the narrator with the lecturer.
It seems that he is not the only person fascinated by her, but it might be just his impression.
The course ends, after few years he learns that Elisabeth died, in her will she bequeathed him with copies of her once published books and with all her notes.
It gives him some inspiration to publish some sort of biography or selection of her thoughts and idea. At the same time he tries to find some details of her private life, specifically of her intimate life.
No practical result.
As for issues of Culture and Civilisation, the main points are some stoic opinions on happiness and sense of life and the reign of caesar Julian the Apostate and a vague deliberations what would have happened if Christianity did not affect the European culture.
I found it rather messy, specifically that it repeated twice in the book and did not add anything to the Wikipedia entry.
Summarising - I did not like this book at all, I gave it 2 stars only because of my sentiment to the author.

P.S. Coincidence - Elisabeth Finch - a coauthor of serial Gray's Anatomy stormed last year to the headlines of media gossip - HERE
I wonder if Julian Barnes got any knowledge of it when choosing the name of the main character of his book. 

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