She had neither the temperament nor the aptitude for fame. She has an idiosyncratic style of teaching, more about getting her students to think for themselves than following any prescribed course content.Įlegant in that quiet British way, fiercely protective of her private life, always poised, she was not in any way a public person nor would she have wanted to be. He had taken a course called Culture and Civilisation, taught by the enigmatic Elizabeth Finch. Neil, a rather ordinary man with two failed marriages and a lacklustre career behind him, is looking back on the most satisfying time of his life. All we ever see are fragments, filtered to reduce our perceptions only to what is permissable, what a person chooses to reveal. The point being that people are unknowable. It’s not until you remove the dustjacket that you can see the image that lies beneath. The photographs are very beautiful though Wikipedia quotes those who interpret the series very differently. Google brought me #StillPuzzled to his website where it explains that the series is a tender photoessay on a photographer’s love for a woman, his wife. The designer Susan Dean is listed, and there’s a mention of a photograph on board from a series called ‘The Eye of Love’ by the Swiss photographer René Groebli. With a dust jacket consisting of cutout spheres and hemispheres on a blue background, the cover design of this latest short novel from Julian Barnes made no sense to me until I saw its name in the credits.

Julian barnes elizabeth finch