Dying Unfinished
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Extending the story of the troubled life of Rosa, a character first developed by the author in Longing, this novel describes her difficult relationship with her mother, Eleanor. Rosa's story unfolds as though in a parallel world: dogged by the same obsessions as her mother and resorting to sex and madness as elements of destruction. At the core of their tension is the illicit affair Eleanor has had with her daughter’s husband, Antonio. Both Rosa and Eleanor find the defining focal point in the same man, whose gift for interpreting the longing of others means his own bitter destruction. Narrated in two voices from perspectives of both women, this novel describes both their lives in depth, covering a span of nearly 70 years during which the world around them undergoes enormous change.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
A turbulent mother-daughter relationship concerns Espinosa's plodding new novel. Both women tell their side of the story: Eleanor, the mother, is a classically unfulfilled postwar wife, married to a self-important artist and working intermittently as a secretary in New York while living in Westbury, Long Island, and pumping out babies, beginning with Rosa. Eleanor has no real pursuit of her own and finds her expression in affairs, while her husband, Aaron, dallies with students. Rosa grows up, and she contributes her version to the narrative: as the daughter of a controlling mother and distracted father, Rosa takes an interest in dance and longs for her parents' acceptance. A breakdown propels her into a mental asylum and later into marriage with a ne'er-do-well who takes an interest in her mother. Unfortunately, the prose is dull and the psychology too heavy-handed.
