The Fifth Woman. Nona Caspers

       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