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Автор: Nona Caspers
Издательство: Ingram
Серия: Mary McCarthy Prize in Short Fiction
Жанр произведения: Здоровье
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781946448187
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      Copyright © 2018 by Nona Caspers

      All rights reserved.

      No part of this book may be reproduced without

      written permission of the publisher.

      Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

      Names: Caspers, Nona, author.

      Title: The fifth woman: a novel in stories / by Nona Caspers.

      Description: First edition. | Louisville, KY: Sarabande Books, 2018

      Identifiers: LCCN 2017039813 (print) | LCCN 2017033119 (e-book) | ISBN 9781946448187 (e-book)

      Classification: LCC PS3553.A79523 A6 2018 (e-book)

      LCC PS3553.A79523 (print) | DDC 813/.54—DC23

      LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017039813

      Cover design by Kristen Radtke.

      Interior by Alban Fischer.

      Sarabande Books is a nonprofit literary organization.

      This project is supported in part by an award from the National Endowment for the Arts. The Kentucky Arts Council, the state arts agency, supports Sarabande Books with state tax dollars and federal funding from the National Endowment for the Arts.

      FOR MY FAMILY AND FRIENDS

      AND FOR MY LITTLE DOG COMPANION

      OF FIFTEEN YEARS, EDGAR

       On the roof of the house Geryon stood

       looking out to sea. Chimneys and lines of laundry surrounded him on all sides.

       Everything curiously quiet.

       —ANNE CARSON, Autobiography of Red

      CONTENTS

       The Closet

       Reception

       The Cat

       Weather

       A Hat Shaped Like a Dog That Looked Like a Cat

       Thinking

       The Horse

       The Fifth Woman

       A Pair of Sunfish

       The Ocean

       The Party

       A Man Older Than Me, but Still Young

       The Letter

       The Crack

       The Ravine

       The Walk

       The Coast of Peru

       The Startup

       Acknowledgments

       FOREWORD

      The Fifth Woman is stealthily astonishing from its first line to its last. Over the course of twenty-three connected short fictions of varying sizes and shapes, the writer marks out a trail of mourning that is both quite straightforward and miraculously layered, strange, and emotionally multifaceted. There is not a single sentence in these stories that is not as clear as water, but neither is there a single sentence here that doesn’t, one way or another, cut deep. As I read and reread these stories, I tried to figure out how the writer cut to the bone with sentences like this. And how, I marveled, did the writer then build these sentences into stories of such power that, taken together, form a unified whole of such emotional depth?

      I’m not sure I have the answers, besides sheer talent and excellent craftsmanship, but I saw that the writer possesses what might be described as a transcendent honesty both physically and metaphysically. For example, the narrator, a young woman in San Francisco, remembers that her dead lover would “rifle through a drawer, her long fingers like antennae.” This is love, this likening of the lover’s long fingers not to, say, lilies, but to what they truly resembled when seeking. In another mode, the narrator remembers the exact quality of her lover’s beauty: “She would be moving, and then she would be stopped, as if she had never been moving. And when she was moving, it seemed she always had been. Whatever she was doing took on the quality of the eternal.” We mourn the lover with the narrator, but/and we mourn her precisely, specifically, and personally. She was that woman, that one who moved in just that way, a way that only someone who loved her deeply can share with us. What she did for a living or what brand of clothing she wore or how much money she made are only facts, and not especially relevant. They are demographics. But the “quality of the eternal” in the way she moved was hers alone, and the one closest to her is the one who saw it most urgently. The writer brings that sense of urgency to every word of The Fifth Woman and, generously, shares it with us with searching and scrupulous tenderness.

      At one point in the collection, the narrator resolves to “write my own stories about everyday occurrences, like people reading things and thinking things, and stories in which the people and the animals just go on living the way we do, many of us, for a long time.” Death, of course, is an everyday occurrence, one of the most everyday of occurrences, and with The Fifth Woman, the writer fulfills the narrator’s ambition to dwell wholeheartedly