Pond

Review by New York Times Review

"POND," A SHARP, funny and eccentric debut from Claire-Louise Bennett, is one of those books so odd and vivid that they make your own life feel strangely remote. It's also hard to categorize or even describe, which is part of its accomplishment. Initially published in 2015, to great acclaim, by an independent press in Ireland, "Pond" consists of 20 interconnected stories - though they're more like soliloquies, or digressive meditations - mostly narrated by the same reclusive, unnamed woman living alone in a cottage on what seems to be the west coast of Ireland. The stories shun conventional narrative devices (like plot), instead dramatizing the associative movement of the narrator's "mind in motion." Some are no more than a few paragraphs, capturing the shard of a sensation; others range across unlikely groups of subjects, from replacing the knobs on a cooktop to suicide. "Stir-Fry" reads, in full: "I just threw my dinner in the bin. I knew as I was making it I was going to do that, so I put in it all the things I never want to see again." In an essay last year for The Irish Times, Bennett wrote, "In solitude you don't need to make an impression on the world, so the world has some opportunity to make an impression on you." Accordingly "Pond" tries to reach insight by way of defamiliarization: Ordinary incidents take on a special light because they are investigated more deeply than they would be in more conventional stories (at times these pieces reminded me of Francis Ponge's fables; Bennett has also been compared to Lydia Davis, though she's more ruminative and digressive a writer). In "Control Knobs," for example, the narrator describes the frustration of watching the knobs on top of her stove crack in two, so that she has to move the single remaining knob from cooker to cooker, waiting for it, too, to fail. (The stove is so old there don't seem to be any replacement parts easily available to her.) Another story, "Morning, 1908," riskily meditates on the question of whether being raped would really be that terrible or whether one could have a kind of animal indifference to it. Over the course of "Pond" we learn almost nothing about the specifics of the narrator's life - she left academia behind, there have been interludes with men that ended painfully - but the stories do seem interestingly haunted by the scar-lattice of failed relationships. "Morning, Noon and Night" begins as a disquisition on the ideal breakfast: "Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice. It ought not to be too ripe - in fact there should be a definite remainder of green along the stalk, and if there isn't, forget about it.... Oatcakes along with it can be nice, the rough sort." But by the end of the piece, she has meditated on "the essential brutality of love" (the subject of some of her former work in academia) and a period of her life when she found herself writing graphic sexual emails to a man she was seeing: "It was wonderful. I'd never done that before.... And that really was what made them so exciting - using language in a way I'd not used it before, to transcribe such an intimate area of my being that I'd never before attempted to linguistically lay bare." You might be wondering - at times I did - why any of this is any good. Sometimes the writing doesn't quite coalesce into transporting insight. But the book's preoccupation with a kind of studied ridding oneself of the superego/organized social self that comes with being an adult works on you, slowly, making you question why so many of our everyday experiences go undescribed. Stylistically, it makes you aware of language as a kind of scar-lattice too, with a damaged history of its own. More than anything this book reminded me of the kind of old-fashioned British children's books I read growing up - books steeped in contrarianism and magic, delicious scones and inviting ponds, otherworldly yet bracingly real. Somehow, Bennett has written a fantasy novel for grown-ups that is a kind of extended case for living an existence that threatens to slip out of time. Such a life, Bennett suggests, is more actual than list-laden, ego-driven, "successful" adulthoods. Reading "Pond," I also thought of David Markson's avant-garde novel "Wittgenstein's Mistress," about a woman who is persuaded she is the only woman left on earth, leaving us to wonder whether or not she is mad. Just as that novel sprung to mind, the narrator of "Control Knobs" began to reflect on what seems to be Marlen Haushofer's 1960s novel "The Wall," another book about a woman who is the last person on earth, and who is trying to survive as long as she can. Bennett's narrator makes the case that the novel she's talking about is not "dystopian" at all but a story of "survival, and the grievous psychological ramifications and grueling practical exigencies occasioned by confinement." Indeed, the narrator says, "you want to be undone in just the way she is being undone- It is like a last daydream from childhood in many ways," because it is "taken up hopefully with ... boundless fantasies of danger and solitude." what is at stake in the difference between the dystopian novel and the novel of survival? In some ways, the stories in "Pond" amount to a kind of manifesto insisting we are missing the very point of our lives: Adulthood's melancholy, its losses, its scars, are its most meaningful elements, they seem to suggest. To experience confinement in a body that travels in one direction through time is to be wounded, but somewhat magically so. Somehow, this is connected, for the narrator, to the wild empty imaginings of childhood. The book's title is drawn from a story about preparations for an unspecified "big day" (perhaps a wedding) on the property. Someone places a sign that says "pond" beside the small, shallow pond - an action the narrator finds unforgivable. "I can't help but assess the situation from the child's perspective. And quite frankly I would be disgusted to the point of taking immediate vengeance if I was brought to a purportedly magical place one afternoon in late September and thereupon belted down to the pond, all by myself most likely, only to discover the word pond scrawled on a poxy piece of damp plywood right there beside it." Why does it matter? Because all these attempts to label, name and stave off accidents are part of the "moronic busy bodying" that adulthood preoccupies itself with instead of remaining open to the marvelous accident and inhuman strangeness of life on this planet. Childhood, the narrator reflects, is a time "to develop the facility to really notice things so that, over time, and with enough practice, one becomes attuned to the earth's embedded logos and can experience the enriching joy of moving about in deep and direct accordance with things." There is a kind of existential tension here, because of course adults are meant to become adult. "Pond" - which can be mordantly funny - is haunted by a feeling of semi-tragedy, a quality of loss that's hard to put one's finger on. Despite its occasional unevenness, "Pond" makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. In the United States, we love the maximalist work, the sprawling Great American Novel. But "Pond" reminds us that small things have great depths. Unlike the pond the narrator lives beside within its pages, Bennett's "Pond" is anything but shallow. Reaching insight by way of defamiliarization: ordinary incidents investigated deeply. MEGHAN O'ROURKE is the author of a memoir, "The Long Goodbye." Her third poetry collection will be published next year.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [August 11, 2016]

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Review by Booklist Review

*Starred Review* For this debut collection of stories, first published by a tiny press in Ireland before gaining international recognition, Bennett has received favorable comparisons to Lydia Davis, Lynne Tillman, and Samuel Beckett, among others. The stories, which range from more than 20 pages to no more than a few sentences, share the same narrator, a nameless woman who lives alone in rural Ireland, although the exact location is never identified. While it carries obvious similarities to pond-inspired Walden, Thoreau's seminal reflections on solitude, Bennett's innovative and elegant prose is more interested in the interactions between the interiority of her narrator's character and the felt presence of the world around her. Whether she's wandering the coastal countryside or contemplating suicide and literature, the narrator inhabits a world that feels magical and dreamlike even as it is rooted in the exacting features and tactile reality of a real place: a seashell, a bowl of potato peelings, a blanket, embroidered cloth. In her celebration of such minutiae, Bennett re-creates the experience of a believable, uniquely captivating persona. Pond deserves to be discovered and dived into, so thoroughly does Bennett submerge readers into her meticulously dazzling world. For readers enamored of short stories and meditative nature writing.--Báez, Diego Copyright 2016 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.

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Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Bennett's debut is a fascinating slim volume that eschews traditional narrative conventions to offer 20 mostly linked sections-it's impossible to classify them strictly as chapters or stories-narrated by a nameless woman living in a small cottage in rural Ireland. The sections vary in length, with some as short as a few sentences, and each offers the reader insight into the rather quiet life of Bennett's narrator. Instead of telling straightforward stories, she wanders in a stream of consciousness manner from one ordeal to the next: lamenting the broken knobs on her kitchen's mini-stove leads to an explanation of a novel about the last woman on Earth; deliberating over the best breakfast meals digresses into a story about gardening. The reader lives in the narrator's head, learning tangentially through her words about her failed attempt at a doctorate, her romantic life, and her unwavering fear of strangers. Yet, despite these revelations, the empty spaces of the narrator's life, left for the reader to fill in, are what make the book captivating. Never do we glean her name, or occupation, or appearance. She is a physical blank slate, there for the reader's imagination to round out. Bennett has achieved something strange, unique, and undeniably wonderful. (July) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

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Review by Library Journal Review

[DEBUT] Even as it focuses on life's everyday details-"the commonplace order of things," as the unidentified speaker would say-Irish author Bennett's linked-vignette debut novel remains luminous and endlessly fascinating. For these small moments give way to endless reflection revealing the speaker's rich interior life and how, in fact, our movement through the mundane can release a blazing stream of thought. The placement of bowls on a sill, the best way to eat porridge, a big event at the landlady's (the reason forgotten) prompting a donation of colored straws, dirt from the garden showing through polished fingernails, the stove's knobs, the sound of the dryer, collecting sticks after a storm, and recalling a speaking engagement (about the brutality of love, which the speaker seems to skirt, enjoying men mostly when inebriated): all inspire commentary delivered in a measured, matter-of-fact tone that's at once almost funnily earnest and lyrically, thoughtfully deep. In one scene, the speaker describes two artworks she has bought-black cloths with rose-gold stitches that seem partly picked away but on careful inspection converge into sharp and affecting scenes telling a story. That's how this novel works. Verdict Highly recommended for discriminating readers. [See Prepub Alert, 2/1/16.]-Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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Review by Kirkus Book Review

First published in Ireland, Bennett's meditative debutrigorous, poetic, and often very funnycaptures the rich inner life of a young woman living a mostly solitary existence in a remote coastal town. An interior portrait in 20 fragmentssome short-story length, others just a few sentencesthis collection abandons conventional notions of plot altogether. Nothing much "happens" here; there is essentially no "action"at least, not by any traditional definition of the term. Instead, Bennett presents a series of exquisitely detailed, deeply subjective, frequently hilarious monologues on the business of being alive. Despite her constant presence, we know very few biographical facts about our nameless heroine. But we see the way her mind works, and we get to know herdeeply, even intimatelythrough her observations. In "Morning, Noon Night," she recounts bits and pieces of a past romance ("We didn't get along very well but this had no bearing whatsoever on our sexual rapport which was impervious and persuasive and made every other dwindling aspect of our relationship quite irrelevant for some time"); in "Control Knobs," she chroniclesamong many, many other, less tangible thingsher quest to get the broken knob on her "decrepit cooking device" fixed. "Stir-fry" is just two bare sentences. "I just threw my dinner in the bin. I knew as I was making it I was going to do that, so I put in it all the things I never want to see again." It feels both crass and inaccurate to reduce any chapter to a single "about"; each fragment is simultaneously hyperspecific and sweeping. Short as it is, this is a demanding read: with its sharp, winding sentences, it's not a book that washes over you but a book that you work for. But the attention pays off: quietly striking, Bennett's debut lingers long after the last page. Strange and lyrical with an acute sense of humor. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

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Morning, Noon & Night Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice. It ought not to be too ripe-in fact there should be a definite remainder of green along the stalk, and if there isn't, forget about it. Though admittedly that is easier said than done. Apples can be forgotten about, but not bananas, not really. They don't in fact take at all well to being forgotten about. They wizen and stink of putrid and go almost black. Oatcakes along with it can be nice, the rough sort. The rough sort of oatcake goes especially well with a banana by the way-by the way, the banana might be chilled slightly. This can occur in the fridge overnight of course, depending on how prescient and steadfast one is about one's morning victuals, or, it might be, and this in fact is much more preferable, there's a nice cool windowsill where a bowl especially for fruit can always be placed. A splendid deep wide sill with no wooden overlay, just the plastered stone, nice and chilly: the perfect place for a bowl. Even a few actually, a few bowls in fact. The sill's that big it can accommodate three sizeable bowls very well without appearing the least bit encumbered. It's quite pleasant, then, to unpack the pannier bags and arrange everything intently in the bowls upon the sill. Aubergine, squash, asparagus and small vine tomatoes look terribly swish together and it's no surprise at all that anyone would experience a sudden urge at any time during the day to sit down at once and attempt with a palette and brush to convey the exotic patina of such an irrepressible gathering of illustrious vegetables, there on the nice cool windowsill. Pears don't mix well. Pears should always be small and organised nose to tail in a bowl of their very own and perhaps very occasionally introduced to a stem of the freshest red currants, which ought not to be hoisted like a mantle across the freckled belly of the topmost pear, but strewn a little further down so that some of the scarlet berries loll and bask between the slowly shifting gaps. Bananas and oatcakes are by the way a very satisfactory substitute for those mornings when the time for porridge has quite suddenly passed. If a neighbour has been overheard or the towels folded the day's too far in and porridge, at this point, will feel vertical and oppressive, like a gloomy repast from the underworld. As such, in all likelihood, a submerged stump of resentment will begin to perk up right at the first mouthful and will very likely preside dumbly over the entire day. Until, finally, at around four o'clock, it becomes unfairly but inevitably linked to someone close by, to a particular facet of their behaviour in fact, a perpetually irksome facet that can be readily isolated and enlarged and thereupon pinpointed as the prime cause of this most foreboding sense of resentment, which has been on the rise, inexplicably, all day, since that first mouthful of porridge. Some sort of black jam in the middle of porridge is very nice, very striking in fact. And then a few flaked almonds. Be careful though, be very careful with flaked almonds; they are not at all suitable for morose or fainthearted types and shouldn't be flung about like confetti because almonds are not in the least like confetti. On the contrary, flaked almonds ought not to touch one another and should be organised in simple patterns, as on the side of a pavlova, and then they are quite pretty and perfectly innocuous. But shake out a palmful of flaked almonds and you'll see they closely resemble fingernails that have come away from a hand which has just seen the light of day. Black jam and blanched fingernails, slowly sinking into the oozing burgoo! Lately, in the mornings, Ravel, played several times over, has been a very nice accompaniment indeed. And this, for now, is how, with minor variations, the day begins. My own nails are doing very well as a matter of fact, indeed, I'm not sure they have ever done better. If you must know I painted them in the kitchen last Wednesday after lunch, and the shade I painted them right there in the kitchen is called Highland Mist. Which is a very good name, a very apt name, as it turns out. Because, you see, the natural colour of my nail, both the white part and the pink part, is still just about visible beneath the polish, it hasn't been completely obscured. And as time passes the polish doesn't chip away as such, it just sort of thins out around the edges, so now, as well as being able to see the white part and the pink part, the soot beneath the tips is also clearly visible. There, through the mist, which is of course the colour of heather, I can see coal dust beneath my fingernails. When the nails aren't painted at all this dirt has no other effect besides looking grubby and unkempt, but under the thinning sheen of Highland Mist something further occurs to me when I consider my hands. They look like the hands of someone very charming and refined who has had to dig themselves up out of some dank and wretched spot they really shouldn't have fallen into. And that amuses me, that really amuses me. Indeed, it wouldn't be entirely unwarranted to suggest that I might, overall, have the appearance and occasionally emanate the demeanour of someone who grows things. That's to say, I might, from time to time, be considered earthy in its most narrow application. However, truth is, I have propagated very little and possess only a polite curiosity for horticultural endeavours. It's quite true that bright green parsley grows out of a pot near my door but I did not grow it from seed, not at all-I simply bought it already sprouted from a nearby supermarket, turned the plant out its plastic carton and shoved its compacted network of roots and soil here, into the pot next to my door. Prior to that, some years ago, when I lived near the canal, I could plainly see from my bedroom window a most idyllic piece of land, encircled by the gardens of houses in back-to-back streets which thereby rendered it landlocked and enticing. It seemed impossible to get to the garden yet when I tore after a cat early one day he led me directly to it, whereupon he skedaddled sharpish and left me a tortured wren to cradle and fold. The wren had sung above my head for many weeks in the sunshine while I wrote letters in the morning and so it was only natural for me to cry out when I found it maimed and silent on the moss beneath the privet hedge. I was so upset I wanted to take that cat to a hot pan and sear its foul backside in an explosion of oil. I'll make you hiss you little shit. Never mind. I was in the garden that nobody owned or imposed upon and now that I had come here once I could come here again, surely. That's how it worked when I was a child anyhow, and I don't suppose these matters change a great deal. I made sly enquiries just as a child does but unfortunately in contrast to a child I was listened to rather too attentively and so I quickly devised a wholesome reason for wishing to know who owned the land and whether I might visit it from time to time. It would be a very excellent place to grow things I'm sure I said and despite having never demonstrated any enthusiasm for gardening before and despite my statement of interest being really rather vague my proposition was taken seriously and since it turned out the land was in fact owned by the Catholic Church I was directed to the large house on the corner where the parish priest himself resided. This development was not something I had foreseen, truth be told I'd had no purposeful intentions. I think I just fancied the idea of having a secluded place to stand about in now and then, a secret garden if you like. And I should never have said a word about it because as usual the minute I did it all became quite misshapen and not what I had in mind at all, and yet there was something so alien and absurd about how it was all progressing that I couldn't help but go right along with it. He was pleasantly perfunctory and did not mention anything at all about God, though he did enunciate the word bounty rather pointedly, but I didn't flinch. Where do you live, he said. Over in that house there, I said, and pointed through the window at a house across the road. He didn't look in the direction of my finger, it was quite sufficient for him that I could stand where I was and at the same time point to my house, and so it was settled. I do not remember the interior of the priest's house. I think the wallpaper in the hallway might have been sage green. It could be the case that I went in no further than the hallway. Perhaps I just stood at the door on the street looking in at the hallway. And then down at the plastic step. Yes, I believe he was wearing trainers in fact. Clearing a decent area of ground and making it ready for planting potatoes was hard and monotonous work added to which early spring tends to be rather humid here and indeed it was so that particular year. I do not know fully what drove me to deracinate thick and fuzzy weeds like that every day in the premature heat. I often stopped and stood quite still, wondering what hopes my mind had just then been taken up with, but I could seldom recall. However, in spite of my own bemusement, for the first time in my adult life other people knew exactly what I was doing. It was as plain as day to them. I'd come back with the tools and lean them against the house wall and go inside to wash my hands and it would be quite clear to anyone who saw me what I had been doing that day. I believe during that period people were, notwithstanding two or three specific incidents, conspicuously more agreeable towards me. As with most mensurable areas of life I demonstrated no ambition whatsoever as a grower and selected to cultivate low-maintenance crops only. Potatoes, spinach and broad beans. That was it. That was enough. People told me what a cinch it was to grow courgettes, squash, marrow, carrots, but nothing had changed really-I hadn't suddenly become a gardener, and I resented being spoken to as though I had. The plants were coming on quite nicely when I received an invitation to speak at a very eminent university across the water upon a subject I was very interested in indeed-though not necessarily in a meritorious way. That's to say my interest was far too personal and not strictly academic and so my methodology came across as nostalgic and my perspective rather naive since I ignored the usual critical frameworks which were anyhow quite incomprehensible to me and instead pilfered haphazardly from the entire history of Western literature in order to strengthen my argument, which I cannot now recall. It had something to do with love. About the essential brutality of love. About those adventitious souls who deliberately seek out love as a prime agent of total self-immolation. Yes, that's right. It attempted to show that in the whole history of literature love is quite routinely depicted as an engulfing process of ecstatic suffering which finally, mercifully, obliterates us and delivers us to oblivion. Dismembered and packed off. Something like that. Something along those lines. I am mad about you. I am going out of my mind. My soul burns for you. I am inflamed. There is nothing now, nothing except you. Gone, quite gone. That kind of thing. I don't think it went down very well. In fact I think it was considered rather unsophisticated and I remember feeling, despite my new floral chemise, suddenly sullen and practically gothic. Actually, now that I come to think of it, I think the gist of my argument was simply that love is indeed a vicious and divine disintegration of selfhood and that artistic representations of it as such aren't at all uncommon or outlandish and have nothing whatsoever to do with endeavouring to shock an audience. There was an awful lot of violence you see in the work of the playwright the conference was reputedly reassessing and by and large that violence had hitherto been widely interpreted as nothing more than a dramatic strategy designed to shock, which I could never quite accept because how on earth is there anything shocking about violence? Anyway, I must confess, in order to establish a perennial language of love that testified to the abominable emancipation that is brought on by want of another I did in fact reference not only Sappho, Seneca, Novalis, Roland Barthes, Denis de Rougement and Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, I also included lyrics by PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, with the somewhat misplaced intention of demonstrating that it just never stops. That the desire to come apart irrevocably will always be as strong as, if not stronger than, the drive to establish oneself. As deep as ink and black, black as the deepest sea. Afterwards, when people were milling about and nodding in little groups, and I wasn't sure which of the several exits to make immediate use of, one of the academic big guns approached me and commented upon my paper. This all happened several years ago by the way-and I'm not absolutely sure why I'm recounting it here since it hardly situates me in a very flattering light-anyway, I don't recall exactly what he said to me, but it was exceedingly condescending and I very very clearly remember thinking why don't you fall over. Why don't you become tangled in some cables near the screen at the front on your way out and fall over and why don't you smack your head off a very sharp corner of the desk where earlier I sat and delivered my oh so charming missive and cut your head open ever so slightly so that a little bit of blood drops out. Just a little trickle of blood so that you don't look injured, only stupid and a bit iffy. Thank you very much, I said. And suddenly my back went cold so I deduced that the outside must after all be right there behind me; I turned around and walked towards it and very soon the ground did in fact change. It was wet and the car park was almost empty and smelt exclusively of dishcloths. Excerpted from Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.

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