7/8/2023 0 Comments Pond claireThe book is shot through with Annie Dillard-like epiphanies – ‘A divination came to me’ – and yet remains earthbound, funny and occasionally vulgar, like Lydia Davis valorising the humdrum without the familiar baggage of work, family, the weight of expectation and panic over time. This item: Pond: Claire-Louise Bennett by Claire-Louise Bennett Paperback £8.66 by Keith Ridgway Paperback £6. Instead it is a first-hand examination of solitude: an unrestrained account of the mind at play as it ricochets from simple objects – vegetables, thatch, underwear – to suggestions, ideas, memories and impressions of the external world. Pond, her debut book of stories, published earlier this year by pioneering Irish press The Stinging Fly, and now in London by upstarts Fitzcarraldo Editions, is hardly a book of stories at all. Bennett’s unnamed narrator is a young academic who’s. 2015) Review by Daniel Hartley The stories in Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond feature a consistent narratorial voice: a female first-person narrator who recounts past events, hypothetical situations, and self-discoveries to an implied interlocutor. ‘Regrettably I don’t think my first language can be written down at all … I think it has to stay where it is simmering in the elastic gloom betwixt my flickering organs.’īennett is an English-born writer who lives on the west coast of Ireland. The Irish writer Claire-Louise Bennett’s first novel, Pond, dabbles in a black art we don’t get enough of in summertime: misanthropy. Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett (Fitzcarraldo Editions, Oct. ‘English, strictly speaking, is not my first language,’ explains the unnamed narrator whose feverish reflections are the subject of Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond.
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