The Barnes & Noble Review
Into a summer of withering heat, political hysteria, and the potential unraveling of Europe comes Pond, a cool and curious dive into a deceptively small world. First published last year by an independent press in Ireland, the book marks the move by writer Claire-Louise Bennett from a series of essays and short stories, which have earned her critical acclaim, to the sustained voice of a collection. And what a voice it is.
In Pond you tumble down a rabbit hole into an unsettling realm of ultra-close focus. Here the minutiae of daily life — how best to chill a banana, why the ink in a pen has gone from black to green, the sounds of nature as heard from a certain picnic blanket — take on the weight of the universe. Our guide is an enigmatic young woman, the world she inhabits shaped in twenty short . . . stories? What they actually are — studies or chapters or literary etudes — is up for grabs.
There is no plot, no story arc, no characters to meet and learn about. There's just Bennett's voice and her singular vision. In pieces that range in length from a few sentences to more than twenty pages, with all but the final entry written in first person, you're left on your own to figure things out.
Bennett never names her narrator, a onetime graduate student who has recently quit a Ph.D. program. She has left the city behind and taken up residence in a small stone cottage on the western coast of Ireland. The young woman speaks directly to us in rambling monologues, more than a little bit strange, always intense, and often wickedly funny.
When we first meet her it's the banana that holds her attention. This leads to thoughts on the microclimate of a kitchen windowsill, which shifts to an analysis of the contents of a fruit bowl ("Pears should always be small and organized nose to tail in a bowl of their own") and on to a discussion of the pros and cons of various breakfast options.
This pinpoint vision telescopes inward until it feels vertiginous. Bennett offers us mere breadcrumbs, the tiniest building blocks of plot — allusions to a string of lovers, the narrator's realization that she likes sex only when drunk, an old letter so fraught she can neither read nor discard it.
You stumble a bit and waver: will you go on to the next sentence, to the next page? Yes, yes, let's go on — the lovely writing, as precise and disorienting as the narrator, pulls you into its deceptively gentle current.
What with the remote cottage, the obsessive detail and the failed doctoral thesis, which lies abandoned in a shed ("Many of the pages loose, and I knew very well they weren't in any order"), these at first look like writings of a woman in full retreat. It's a surprise, then, in this close and closed-in world, each time the outside world enters.
There's a speaking engagement our narrator accepts at an academic conference, a nearby neighbor whose house she often visits, and a lively summer party she throws because "I have so many glasses after all." At the conference, the narrator gives a bold talk that shrugs off centuries of male perspective on the rhapsodies of love and presents it instead as "a vicious and divine disintegration of selfhood . . . "
Afterward, as the conference participants chat, an academic bigwig looks down his nose at the narrator's speech. Rather than being abashed, she goes in for a bit of bashing. She hopes he will trip and fall and cut his head with "just a trickle of blood so you don't look inured, only stupid and a bit iffy."
The narrator's flight from academia turns out to mirror Bennett's own change of direction. Instead of completing the postgrad work about which she says she felt tepid, Bennett moved from London to Ireland. She left the university behind but not her writing. In Pond, there's a nod to her awareness of the experimental nature of her work, though with its assured style it seems more accurate to view it as an investigation.
"English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way," the narrator tells us. "I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things. I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don't think my first language can be written down at all. I don't think it can be made external, you see."
And yet, as Bennett shows repeatedly in the strange and exhilarating universe beneath Pond's surface, it can.
Veronique de Turenne is a Los Angeles–based journalist, essayist, and playwright. Her literary criticism appears on NPR and in major American newspapers. One of the highlights of her career was interviewing Vin Scully in his broadcast booth at Dodger Stadium, then receiving a handwritten thank-you note from him a few days later.
Reviewer: Veronique de Turenne
The New York Times Book Review - Meghan O'Rourke
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…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…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…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.
The New York Times - Dwight Garner
Pond is a slim novel, told in chapters of varying lengths that resemble short stories. There's little in the way of conventional plot. But Ms. Bennett has a voice that leans over the bar and plucks a button off your shirt. It delivers the sensations of Edna O'Brien's rural Irish world by way of Harold Pinter's clipped dictums…Pond is filled with short intellectual junkets into many topics. At other times it drifts, sensually, into chapters that resemble prose poems. You swim through this novel as you do through a lake in midsummer, pushing through both warm eddies and the occasional surprisingly chilly draft from below…As a writer, Ms. 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…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.
Publishers Weekly
★ 05/02/2016
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)
From the Publisher
‘Wielding a wry but implacable logic, Claire-Louise Bennett dives under the surface of “ordinary” experiences and things to reveal their supreme and giddy illogic. Like Gail Scott and Lydia Davis before her, she writes an impeccable affect-less prose that almost magically arrives at something extraordinary.’
— Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick
‘This is an extraordinary collection of short stories – profoundly original though not eccentric, sharp and tender, funny and deeply engaging. A very new sort of writing, Bennett pushes the boundaries of the short story out into new territory: part prose fiction, part stream of consciousness, often truly poetry and always an acute, satisfying, delicate, honest meditation on both the joys and frustrations of a life fully lived in solitude. Take it slowly, because it is worth it, and be impressed and joyful.’
— Sara Maitland, author of A Book of Silence
‘I’d heard more good whispers about Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett than almost any other debut this year so, by the time I read it, expectations were high and – as it turned out – not disappointed. These stories are intelligent and funny, innovative and provocative, and it’s impossible to read them without thinking that here is a writer who has only just begun to show what she can do.’
— Eimear McBride, author of A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing
‘Claire-Louise Bennett is a major writer to be discovered and treasured.’
— Deborah Levy, author of Swimming Home
‘Bennett’s language is an ornate and long-winded riposte to all those pared-back minimalists, and I love it.’
— Jon McGregor, The Guardian
‘This is a truly stunning debut, beautifully written and profoundly witty.’
— Andrew Gallix, The Guardian
‘Claire-Louise Bennett sets the conventions of literary fiction ablaze in this ferociously intelligent and funny debut. Don't be fooled by Pond’s small size. It contains multitudes.’
— Jenny Offill, author of Weather
‘As brilliant a debut and as distinct a voice as we’ve heard in years – this is a real writer with the real goods.’
— Kevin Barry, author of City of Bohane
‘A touch of William Gaddis. A touch of Lydia Davis. A touch of Samuel Beckett. A touch of Edna O’Brien. And yet Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond feels entirely unique. Quiet and luxurious all at once, this will be one of the most sensational debuts of the year.’
— Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin
From the Publisher - AUDIO COMMENTARY
"Bennett has achieved something strange, unique, and undeniably wonderful." —Publishers Weekly Starred Review
AUGUST 2016 - AudioFile
This unconventional audiobook challenges the listener to be open, inquisitive, and patient. While Lucy Rayner's narration is lovely in its oddly engaging detachment, the novel itself lacks a traditional linear plot. Instead, one must be content to immerse oneself in a series of loosely connected stories about an unnamed narrator whose untethered thoughts meander from observations to inspirations to regrets. Rayner's performance creates a solitary personality: a sometimes accessible and likable narrator and sometimes inscrutable and unknowable one. Adding more of a pause between the stories would aid the listener; as is, the brisk delivery adds to the sense of stream-of-consciousness flow. Rayner's adept vocal performance and Bennett's intriguing prose make for an interesting listen for dedicated listeners. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine
Kirkus Reviews
2016-04-13
First published in Ireland, Bennett's meditative debut—rigorous, poetic, and often very funny—captures the rich inner life of a young woman living a mostly solitary existence in a remote coastal town. An interior portrait in 20 fragments—some short-story length, others just a few sentences—this 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 her—deeply, even intimately—through 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 chronicles—among many, many other, less tangible things—her 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.
