Instead, what makes “Pond” so remarkable is Bennett’s ability to capture the mysterious essence of objects and volatility of moments in just a few choice words, on page after page after page.Ī palm’s worth of flaked almonds in N’s morning porridge resembles “fingernails that have come away from a hand which has just seen the light of day.” The preholiday ritual of putting up Christmas decorations becomes an occasion where “one feels turbulent and extrinsic and can’t wait for it all to slump backwards into its shambolic velvet envelope and shuffle off down the hill.” An ex-flame’s resurfaced love letter is “a pell-mell and furious thrashing out of his craving and cowardice.” “The hopelessness of everything I was trying to occupy myself with was at last glaringly crystal clear.”īut the trajectory of N’s daily routine isn’t what’s important. “My wherewithal had quite dried up you see, I’d snubbed it for so long,” she shares with refreshing frankness.

In “Morning, Noon & Night,” we learn that N once stood in the same spot in front of a shop, doing nothing, for 30 minutes - felled by “a sense of fundamental redundancy.” Not long afterward, she dropped out of graduate school to work in a bike repair shop. Yet she recalls exchanging nearly 2,000 “graphic and obscene” emails with a beau during an 18-month-long lust-driven affair before they split, delighting in how fun it was to “linguistically lay bare” all the ways in which she wanted to. By the book’s end, we’ve become deeply in tune with, even seduced by, her zany personality quirks and rich inner monologue precisely because of the tidbits of detail Bennett does permit us to see.įor example, our narrator - let’s call her “N” - admits to needing alcohol to “acquire any enthusiasm for the opposite sex.” She purposefully busies herself in other rooms when a date - this “awful and accustomed entity” - arrives and makes his way in for a romantic evening. Pond was well received in both the UK and the US, and was featured in both The New Yorker and The New York Times in 2016.Over the course of just under 200 pages, we never find out the narrator’s name, nor do we uncover too many concrete specifics about her past, where she’s headed in the future or the town she calls home, except that she resides in a cozy wooded cottage with a pond nearby.īut it almost doesn’t matter. The shortest story in Pond runs to only a couple of sentences. It focuses on the details of her daily experience, from the best way to eat porridge to an encounter with a cow to the ending of an affair.

The stories are written from the perspective of one woman (who is never named, an unnamed protagonist), who lives a solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village. Pond is a collection of 20 short stories written by Claire-Louise Bennett, originally published by The Stinging Fly Press in Ireland on ( ISBN 0-3995-7590-1).

Pond louise bennett