![]() ![]() ![]() So too do the words of Elizabeth’s brother, “pink-cheeked and plump”, who tells Neil he’s “not a literary chap in any way. So began a 20-year routine of biannual lunch dates that lasted until her death, when she left her papers,Īmong them notes for an essay on Julian, to our narrator.Īs Neil sets out to finish the job, an early reference to The Golden Legend, “that medieval assemblage of miracles and martyrdoms”, puts the unready reader on notice (that presumptuous “that”). ![]() He never submitted his final essay, instead asking Elizabeth, whose hauteur arouses much intrigue among her students, out to lunch. The essay’s author is the book’s narrator, Neil, a twice-divorced soap actor turned mushroom grower, who writes in memory of Elizabeth Finch, a lecturer who taught a year-long evening class he attended in London on the subject of “culture and civilisation”. His new novel, riddling to the point of reader-denying, devotes a third of its short length to a 50-page essay on historical views of the Roman emperor Julian the Apostate, who was thwarted in his attempt to ditch Christianity and return Rome to pagan worship. ![]() J ulian Barnes has always enjoyed blurring the boundaries between fiction and nonfiction, writing novels that sound like works of history or criticism. ![]()
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