The Fifth Woman by Nona Caspers

The Fifth Woman by Nona Caspers
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

I get to the middle of Nona Caspers’ book, The Fifth Woman, and suddenly I want to write. D. H. Lawrence’s requisite to great writing, “An interesting mind at work” leaps out at us from the page. That’s why I do this for free, I’m thinking, so I can read free books like these and feel like this… Wow. It’s like a really long prose poem, cut into sections; a sort of mystery play of grief and recovery, loss and redemption; but through a contemporary, Bay Area writer’s life; a transplant from the Middle West, as many of us are.

The clarity of her sentences pulls me into a story I’ve “made up” about the huge, empty house at the corner of Avalon and Claremont that I’ve wanted to write about for weeks, “Its children’s bedroom windows gazing open but empty, southward to the wide, waiting world…” I leap from mere words on the page to a Creator’s viewpoint, The Large. I haven’t read anything this perfect since Laurie Anne Doyle’s World Gone Missing, so right.

It’s a different voice than Doyle’s, of course; plot, thought and emotional pattern; but clear and right in the same way, as if we’re brought into the moment of each story purely, succinctly, cracking open a flat, gray rock and discovering a bright chunk of gold.What used to be surrealism, now called “magical realism” since Allende and Ionesco brought them into fiction and stories; makes immense, mythic and multidimensional the ordinary world.

After a series of interlocked grim but gripping portraits, scenarios and incidents; guided by her beckoning Mother’s image as she steps out her back door into the yard outside; she boards a bus, is transported to a primal deer hunt out of Gen X techie San Francisco, and she stalks and kills, dismembers and transports her venison; recollects her Father, memories of her lover, Michelle; converses with a worm, a bear, her own heart, as she moves through a time where impossible things happen. Like recovering from an intimate death.

Getty Images, Free, Park & Fog

Where are her images from? Her dreams, feelings, hallucinations? Her world is ours, metropolitan, everyone’s. But so full of love, longing and precision. Everyone who’s ever loved and lost, lost hope, kept going, watched time drag and days dwindle and sag, then finally caught sight of a shoelace that’s just a shoelace, a day that’s just a day.

My heart grows wide, my mind triples with these writers. A voice of song, a breath of time, a breeze of hope…

The Berkeley Times, 9 January, 2020, © 2020 Wyndy J Knox Carr

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