"Claire-Louise Bennett's remarkable debut is dense with the sensuous texture of life. The result is a series of tableaus - funny, acute, melancholy, misanthropic - whose charm and beauty lays in their oblique angle of approach. The reader inhabits the narrator's consciousness, gradually creating a picture of a young woman of uncommon intelligence who has left the world of jobs and adult responsibility in the hope of recovering some more enchanting relation of self to world.
Instead of relating a straightforward narrative she progresses via digression: celebrating the arrangement of fruits and vegetables in bowls on the window-sill, lamenting the broken knobs on her kitchen's mini-stove, pondering the deeper meaning of a novel about the last woman on Earth, recalling past sexual misadventures and experiments in gardening plots.
Its sections vary in length, with some as short as a few sentences, and each offers the reader insight into the quiet domestic existence of Bennett's narrator. It is narrated by a nameless woman living in a small cottage in rural Ireland. It may be read as 20 mostly interlinked stories or as a novella fractured into twenty parts. Great literature doesn't point out where to look but how to see everything in a new light, as though we have made the discovery ourselves in a kind of imaginary derive." The Australianīennett's debut is a slim volume that eschews traditional narrative conventions. Let us hope there are some lights that flicker but never go out, and that Americans - like the British and the Irish - are willing to grope through the darkness and oddity of this gorgeous book." Pond's real achievement, in making us look for the 'real' narrator - and narrative - is to make us see everything around us and the things we often overlook, including and especially ourselves. It contains only sharp observations and a constant juggling between beauty and decay, moments stretched and skewed like leaded glass. This collection is for wiseasses and weirdos, a cathedral of strange sentences and unfocused meditations built upon the singular experience of being a human being. Bennett’s stateside debut refuses to stoop, to explain, to tempt its reader with superficial ploys. The tilt of Bennett’s pen (or the stroke of her key) lends gravity to anything it touches. Fractured, voice-driven, and prone to modernistic meanderings, Pond is the sort of avant-garde opus destined to put its author on the map alongside modern-day prose stylists of the highest order. Bennett contorts language into new configurations, twisted such that each piece in the collection brings the reader to face a literary frontier and a singular character.
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