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
A Hat Shaped Like a Dog That Looked Like a Cat
A Man Older Than Me, but Still Young
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
