The most traumatic incident occurs during adult life. A sibling goes unmentioned until the final pages, and total clarity about the narrator’s parents’ marital status arrives at a similar point.
A description of Charlotte Bartlett, the older cousin in A Room With a View – this is a book full of other books – contains a strong hint of self-comparison: “She has spent a lot of time on her own and certainly that makes a person susceptible to overthinking simple transactions and occasionally losing perspective.” Bennett isn’t much beholden to a psychology of origins. Personal interactions are rare and mostly regrettable. If what we’re being offered is some kind of credo or apologia, it’s one with an unusual emphasis on reading, smoking and lying around. But whatever challenges the book poses to breezy reading are the product of unswerving fidelity to its own raw spirit.
Bennett’s unnamed, 40-ish narrator, raised in south-west England but resident in Ireland, holds forth in fevered, looping, breathless prose, and displays a tendency to travel long and far down the blindest of alleys.
Claire-Louise Bennett’s startlingly original first collection slips effortlessly between worlds and is by turns darkly funny and deeply moving.C laire-Louise Bennett’s second novel, like her first book, Pond, enacts a quest for quiddity – the syntax that embodies a cast of mind, the phrase that nails a sensation, the narrative structure that feels like life as it is lived or anyway processed. Captivated by the stellar charms of seclusion but restless with desire, the woman’s relationship with her surroundings becomes boundless and increasingly bewildering. Broken bowls, belligerent cows, swanky aubergines, trembling moonrises and horrifying sunsets, the physical world depicted in these stories is unsettling yet intimately familiar and soon takes on a life of its own. Feverish and forthright, Pond is an absorbing chronicle of the pitfalls and pleasures of a solitudinous life told by an unnamed woman living on the cusp of a coastal town.
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