It is a tribute to the teacher referred to as EF, who wielded an outsize influence on many of her students, including the novel's unprepossessing narrator, Neil. Unfortunately, there is something inert and less than effervescent about Elizabeth Finch. His latest novel, Elizabeth Finch, is a dual-pronged exploration of both personal and ancient history which asks, "Why should we expect our collective memory - which we call history - to be any less fallible than our personal memory?" Barnes' title character, a teacher, drums into her adult students that history "is for the long haul" and "is not something inert and comatose, lying there and waiting for us to apply a spyglass or telescope to it instead, it is active, effervescent, at times volcanic." "History is that certainty produced at the point where the imperfections of memory meet the inadequacies of documentation," Julian Barnes wrote memorably in his 2011 Booker Prize-winner, The Sense of an Ending.
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