Review by Booklist Review
Bennett's (Pond, 2016) kaleidoscopically imaginative, word-enthralled, working-class English narrator reenters the consciousness of her younger selves and tracks how books, reading, and writing shaped each phase of her life, her syntax, vocabulary, and tone evolving as she matures. As a misfit child she learns to take out one book at a time from the library rather than the stack she covets because the other books distract her while she attempts to read. Hyper-observant, she fidgets in school, has a crush on a teacher who encourages her to write, and, with increasing cynicism, becomes cognizant of society's different expectations for men and women. She works for years on a story that stoked the precariousness of her relationship with a poet, a poignant, metaphysical, and wryly witty tale featuring wealthy Tarquin Superbus in "long-ago" Venice who discovers that his vast library contains books with blank pages. When she works in a grocery store during college, the Russian man who always stands in her checkout line eventually presents her with Nietzche's Beyond Good and Evil. Incandescent, surreal, mordantly funny, wrenching, and exhilarating, Bennett's enrapturing paean to literature echoes Jorge Luis Borges, Clarice Lispector, Lynne Tillman, and Lucy Ellmann, pays direct homage to myriad writers, traces the nexus of literature and life, and maps a book-besotted woman's search for meaning.
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Bennett's idiosyncratic and arresting latest (after Pond) explores a woman's tenacious attachment to the written word. The unnamed narrator describes her peculiar experience of reading as a young bookish girl: she thinks "the left page nearly always has better words on it," and, given the readerly urge to turn the page, typesetters are "irresponsible" for allowing "important sentences to appear at the very end of the right page." As an adult, she studies literature, works weekends at a grocery store, and scours books for words that feel "as if they are being written as you read them, that your eyes upon the page are perhaps even making them appear." Along with the narrator's recollections are accounts of her early efforts at writing fiction, "the quickening revolutions of my supremely aberrant imaginings." She recreates the intensity of artistic inspiration and then, from a distance of years, recomposes the lost or abandoned stories themselves, an exercise that proves much more successful than one might expect, as seen in, for instance, a Borgesian tale about a library of blank books concealing one transformative sentence only visible to the collection's owner. Bennett's narrator also recounts interactions with men: a charismatic teacher who senses her fierce talent; vindictive and entitled friends and lovers; and a Nietzsche-toting grocery shopper who, in a scene that demonstrates the destabilizing joy of this book, fills his cart in an "exquisite sequence of sublime prestidigitation." Encompassing literary criticism, suggestive fables, feminist polemic, a portrait of the artist, and a phenomenology of reading, this transfixes on both the right page and the left. Bennett marvels once again. Agent: Melanie Jackson, Melanie Jackson Agency. (Mar.)
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
A voice begins its story with a memory of sitting under a tree in the grass with books. The voice belongs to an Englishwoman in her 40s, living somewhere in Ireland. Readers never learn her name, or many others here. She reads, remembers, and writes. And in a dizzying story at once elliptical, associative, sensuous, and jarring, she summons the elusive symbiosis between lived and imagined experience. Memories of people and events are rooted in the senses, where otherwise dissimilar tastes and smells--marmalade and cigarettes, cucumbers and elastic bands--infuse texture and tangibility into sequences of events and personal habits and traits. Or is it the other way around? The voice offers a brilliant metaphor for her own story when she describes the iris of a rival's eye as an ouroboros; the serpent eternally swallowing its tail complicates the distinction between beginnings and endings as the voice's eye blurs and refocuses the connections among reading, writing, and living. VERDICT Bennett follows her celebrated debut, Pond, with a stunning demonstration of reading as creation.--John G. Matthews
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A woman with a striking resemblance to the author recounts her life as a reader and writer. In the second section of what is labeled as a novel--but which really reads as something genre-less and unique--the young narrator writes her first story. Inside her secondary school classroom, she has opened her exercise book to the back, where she first attempts to sketch a portrait of her absent male teacher in pen. But, as she draws, suddenly "the line broke off into words, just a few words, then a few words more, and the words set out a story, as if it had been there all along." The narrator has already spent a childhood immersed in books, and her story, and the enthusiastic response it garners from its subject when he spots it--to her shock--in her exercise book, cements the narrator's path further into her artistry and its expression through writing. Writing, one could say, is Bennett's true subject, but even that may be too specific: There is an entire section of the book that retells a Calvino-esque fable that the narrator is supposed to have written in her 20s about a gentleman who acquires a vast library only to realize that the entire collection contains only one single sentence capable of unlocking the totality of the receiver's perception, even if they cannot read. What Bennett seems after in her shape-shifting novel is less about books--though there are plenty of those, from Annie Ernaux and Roald Dahl to Sylvia Plath and Ann Quin--and more broadly about the true power of the imagination and the lives it enables us to live when our own seem painfully circumscribed by gender, by place, by circumstance. A kaleidoscopic and ambitious blend of criticism, autofiction, fable, and memoir. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
