At one point the narrator describes her experience reading a book that is recognizable as Die Wand ( The Wall) by Marlen Haushofer, a post-apocalyptic novel about a woman who finds herself cut off from the rest of the world after an unknown catastrophe, and must reckon with being totally alone. Specifically in these times that we are currently living through, it is worth thinking about how we define ourselves and our existence in regard to this. The book is also a meditation on solitude. The narrator herself emerges in an often hilarious way, and reading this book feels like knowing her more deeply than any of the people in her life do. The cottage that she lives in is described without sentimentality, however I want nothing more than to go and live there.

In a different book this would seem like an affectation, but in Pond it feels genuine, as though the narrator is trying to figure out how these people fit together, like a puzzle whose pieces are perhaps just slightly misshapen and won’t interlock, and that therefore their categories are, for the purpose of this exercise, more important than their individual personalities. We hear of her neighbour, her landlady, her landlady’s sister, and her friends, but they are described just like that: my landlady, my friend. We never learn the narrator’s name, nor the names of anyone in her life. “ This all happened several years ago by the way-and I’m not absolutely sure why I’m recounting it here since it hardly situates me in a flattering light-anyway, I don’t recall exactly what he said to me, but it was exceedingly condescending and I very very clearly remember thinking why don’t you fall over.“

She strips herself down to the bones and peers within, and then she remarks upon the strangeness of relating this on paper: Her observations are minute, beautiful, and sometimes devastating. These are the recorded thoughts and experiences of a woman who is engaging with life-that is to say, society, relationships, nature, and survival-in a distinctly unusual way.

I’m tempted to describe the book as a linked series of short stories, but before you think of it in that way you are going to have to toss out everything you think you know about the short story form. Pond, Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut novel, was published in 2016, and chronicles the experiences of a woman living alone in a rented cottage outside of a coastal village in Ireland. That is what writing is about for me, too, tapping into a sense of being, a magic rather than logic.” – Claire-Louise Bennett

Pond claire louise bennett review