AUDIOBOOK RELEASE: The Fifth Wound
A phantasmagorical romance roman à clef
THE FIFTH WOUND by Aurora Mattia terrified me at first. Its poetry-as-prose, maximalist, unapologetically literary, anecdote-and-tangent-rich-stories-within-and-or-adjacent-stories was, quite frankly, mind-boggling. It’s a trip. About 80 pages into my first read, I was panicking: I thought I was good at this! I like literature! I like speculative, avant-garde, alternative stuff that bucks artistic traditionalism and challenges the conception of what is categorically a “thing”! I love the narration self-directing challenge of translating what is on the page to the auditory medium of audiobooks! And I like weird stuff! Why is this book so hard?! I want to like it, but…
Well, my friends, sometimes you just have to do the thing and trust that maybe a second pass will be different. And WOW, was it different for me. I fell in LOVE with this book. And in the not-unsubstantial endeavor of self-directing the narration, I also embraced the responsibility of stewardship. I came to really care about the story, its author, and its eccentricities in a personally artistic way.
THE FIFTH WOUND is a roman à clef — that is, a fictionalized autobiographical work. Therefore, I felt the double responsibility of (1) honoring the author (and her first person avatar) akin to non-fiction; and (2) connecting the listener to a story that can be difficult to follow. I wanted to honor the baroque complexity and literary specificity of the author’s incredible writing, but also do for listeners [on their first listen!] what I only appreciated my second time through the book: I want them to “get” what the hell is going on! …And in every ripe-with-muchness moment! I was unbraiding skeins and solving riddles, then trying to phrase and cluster these jewels so a listener could take for granted the beautiful tangle of the text on the page — without losing anything in translation.
To me, Aurora Mattia’s writing is at once the synthesis of (and almost refutation of) poetry and prose, and its multi-dimensional character is really apparent to me as her narrator. To me, working on this book was like the casting of a spell. It took immense effort, but I feel the conjuring was well worth it. I hope listeners will enjoy the unconventional, raw whimsy of it all. Have faith: by the end of the book, the writing, the story, and its 1st person narration character do actually come to make sense in an aesthetically satisfying way.
The THE FIFTH WOUND asks its reader/listener to commit to the entirety of it, and I really respect that. It is a gorgeous phantasmagoria of a book; it pushes the limits of what a book can do.
Many thanks to the team at Tantor for producing this title.
🖤🤎❤🧡💛💚💙💜 { progress rainbow heart emojis }
Cheers!
Nicky
