Non Finito, A Novel

Non Finito, A Novel Dorisa D. Costello, Ph.D. Department of English University of Illinois at Chicago Chicago, Illinois (2012) Dissertation Chairperson: Christina Mazza This fiction novel is interested in both formal and thematic fragmentation. The name, Non Finito, in fact, is a term borrowed from the art world to denote a work that has been purposefully left unfinished. Structurally, this novel tells three narratives in five parts made up of un-numbered fragmented sections which sometimes complement each other and sometimes collide with or radically revise one another. The narratives take place in three different time periods and locations: contemporary Los Angeles, Victorian England and ancient Greece. Each narrative follows a central protagonist as he or she struggles through disease, relational rejection and loss. None of the narrative arcs are ‘complete,’ in that there are spaces of time that simply cannot be recovered. The other narratives at times seem to provide the missing parts, yet these are often revealed as false, or at least problematized as subjective memories; the original events are lost and cannot be recovered. Thematically, this loss and revisionary storytelling runs through the three narratives and unifies them.