Dying Unfinished, a novel by Maria Espinosa

Reviewed by Scott Bowen

ISBN-10: 0916727459
ISBN-13: 978-0916727451
Wings Press, January 2009

In Maria Espinosa’s latest novel, Dying Unfinished, we follow the lives of Eleanor and her daughter Rosa, a character first gleaned in Espinosa’s American Book Award winner, Longing. We are exposed early on to the tethered ends of the Bernstein family, as terms such as “love” and “fidelity” are held as loosely as the marriage between Aaron and Eleanor. “'Where is she?' Aaron would ask when he came home. 'Where is she?' The children would ask. They were birds with hungry beaks who pecked away at her soul and body."

In a variety of voices—primarily Eleanor and her passionate yet estranged daughter Rosa—Espinosa spins a tale of passion and profound apathy. Eleanor, who buried her poetic dreams to marry Aaron for his artistic fervor, grows tired of a gradually cooling marriage and so chooses a clandestine sexual life of her own. In turn, Aaron had married Eleanor for her grounded, pragmatic personality, but soon becomes bored as his sexual appetite slowly drifts toward his younger art students. Despite these trespasses, an unspoken acceptance settles on their lives as each retains what attracted them most to one another.

As they left, the two men were deep in conversation. Aaron had picked up his blow torch and was explaining how he would weld a leg onto the upper half of a copper female body. “She has no feet,” said Heinrich. “Her feet will be part of the earth,” said Aaron.

Their cold indifference, however, affects the oldest of the three Bernstein children, Rosa, the most. Born with Aaron’s brilliance and Eleanor’s desperate promiscuity, Rosa is unable to express herself to a mother preoccupied with her own sorrow and a father who sees her as merely one of his many sculptures. Starved for attention and an outlet for her preternatural talents, she soon finds solace, like her mother, with others: "By fucking men, I [Rosa] believed that I was getting to know something essential about human nature. 'If the fool persists in her folly she will become wise.' That is, if she survives."

Rosa, despite emotional anguish and even a stint within a mental institution, indeed survives. Despite a failed marriage of her own, Rosa turns darkness into light with the birth of her own daughter, Isabel, and is given the chance to become the woman Eleanor was too afraid to be.

Dying Unfinished, in lavish, invigorating prose, is Maria Espinosa’s insight into the darkest shadows of family life. Though multiple viewpoints may initially stun the reader, one is quickly rewarded with a resolution that displays how the sins of parents can be overcome by the resolve of a daughter.

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Mr. Bowen currently resides in eastern North Carolina. He occupies his time writing both novel length and short fiction concerning a prophet of his own design, playing house husband, and taking a stab at Native American crafts. He is currently working on his B.A. degree in English at East Carolina University.

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