Nothingness and Meaning

By combining realism and fantasy, this novel explores the innate human desire for a belief in the divine and mythical as an antidote to the nothingness and emptiness of modern, mundane, everyday life.

Firstly, the author introduces her heroine and the overriding sense of nothingness that she feels at the beginning of the novel, in order to set the tone for what follows. Lucy feels a deep void of nothingness within her, and this is communicated and explored through her doctoral thesis on Sappho, which develops in parallel with her own personal growth and evolution. At the beginning of the novel, Lucy introduces her thesis to her readers, which is titled “The Accentual Gap: Sappho’s Spaces as Essence” (2). Her thesis explores the blank spaces that exist in the records we have of Sappho’s text that have accumulated over time to do the...