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Staff Pick
Few books have shaped my sense of what fiction can be so simply and radically as Bennett's Pond. Quiet yet bold, meditative and strange, sometimes fracturing into poetry, other times lingering long in prose that is driven by interiority, specificity, and a highly self-conscious syntax — I come to this book over and over again to remember that there is nothing more strange or surprising than the ordinary — if one is paying attention. Recommended By Darla M., Powells.com
Written in lyric fragments that transform the mundane elements of everyday life into transcendent, beautiful moments, Irish writer Claire-Louise Bennett's debut focuses on the interior life of a woman living alone in a rural cottage. Pond is a series of loosely connected sections, some of which are brief, paragraph-long moments, others of which are longer, more narrative-driven explorations of the narrator's daily life. Each section explores the tides of the narrator's consciousness; her often unusual perceptions, thoughts, and feelings about her quiet life in the countryside are described as if in a dream. Bennett transmutes the narrator's simple experiences like breaking a bowl or observing cows into something dazzling, darkly funny, and deeply moving. Recommended By Ariel K., Powells.com
Synopses & Reviews
"A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut… Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent.… [It]reminds us that small things have great depths." – New York Times Book Review
"Dazzling…exquisitely written and daring ." – O, the Oprah Magazine
Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. A deceptively slender volume, it captures with utterly mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experience — from the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cows—rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood. The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointments — the ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover. As the narrator’s persona emerges in all its eccentricity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help but see mirrored there our own fraught desires and limitations, and our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known.
Shimmering and unusual, Pond demands to be devoured in a single sitting that will linger long after the last page.
Review
"A work of fiction that will make you feel pleasantly insane…Like Lydia Davis, Bennett…takes a state of mind closely associated with madness and places it in settings that are utterly domestic, mundane. The result is fervid and fearful…It is also funny…unnerving… sensitive to the point of being porous…lucid, practical, and excruciatingly cognizant of what is normal." The New Yorker
Review
"Imagine a short-story collection written by Emily Dickinson, and you’ll get the weird genius of this book." The Boston Globe
Review
"A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut … one of those books so odd and vivid they make your own life feel strangely remote. Somehow, Bennett has written a fantasy novel for grownups that is a kind of extended case for living an existence that threatens to slip out of tune…Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. … [It]reminds us that small things have great depths." The New York Times Book Review
Review
"[An] auspicious debut … Bennett seems to know exactly what to take seriously. She puts us inside a complicated, teeming mind, and she doesn’t dabble in forced epiphanies… Sometimes first novels like Pond are one-offs. They deliver a voice the author can’t tap again. Ms. Bennett’s sensibility here feels like the tip of a deep iceberg, and I’ll be in line to read whatever she publishes next. Her witty misanthropy is here to ward off mental scurvy." The New York Times
About the Author
Claire-Louise Bennett’s short fiction and essays have been published in The Moth, The Irish Times, and other publications. She was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize in 2013. Pond is her first book. Bennett lives in Galway, Ireland.