Pond (Bennett)

Pond 
Claire-Louise Bennett, 2015 (U.S., 2016)
Penguin Publishing
208 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780399575891


Summary
Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it.

A deceptively slender volume, it captures with utterly mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal village.

Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experience—from the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cows, rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer than a page—but always suffused with the hypersaturated, almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we remember from childhood.

The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointments—the ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover. As the narrator’s persona emerges in all its eccentricity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help but see mirrored there our own fraught desires and limitations, and our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known.

Shimmering and unusual, Pond demands to be devoured in a single sitting that will linger long after the last page. (From the publisher.)

Author Bio
• Birth—N/A
• Where—Wiltshire, England, UK
• Education—B.A., University of Roehampton
• Currently—lives in Galway, Ireland


Claire-Louise Bennett grew up in Wiltshire in the southwest of England. After studying literature and drama at the University of Roehampton in London, she settled in Galway, Ireland.

Her short fiction and essays have been published in The Stinging Fly, Penny Dreadful, The Moth, Colony, Irish Times, White Review and gorse. She was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize in 2013 and has received bursaries from the Arts Council and Galway City Council. This is her first collection of stories. (From Stinging Fly Press.)

Book Reviews
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.
Dwight Garner - New York Times


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.
Mehgan O'Rourke - New York Times Book Review


[A] smart, funny, elliptical debut…. Reminiscent of Joyce and Beckett in its unmistakably Irish blend of earthy wit and existential unease. Yet Bennett does much more than emulate literary forebears. Pond expressed her unique sensibility in deceptively simply, delightfully unsettled prose. We’ll be hearing more from this formidably gifted young writer.
Boston Globe


[Pond] contains no story, no action and...one describable character and is defined as much by these absences as by the material that remains. What’s left on the page are the gleanings of a “mind in motion,” to borrow Ms. Bennett’s phrase—reflections on everyday objects, philosophical digressions, daydreams and stirred-up memories and associations.... The book is reminiscent of a country diary, with entries that dwell on the narrator’s breakfast routine or her vegetable garden.... Hers is a mind in attentive communion with itself, building baroque and beautiful cloud castles of thought to distract from the storms of the real.
Wall Street Journal


An elegant and intoxicating debut novel…rich with strange, sensuous and exhilarating moods and textures…we are captivated by the narrator’s sharply illuminated interior reality and her lyrical depictions of the nature about her. Boldly defying convention, Pond is an exceptional debut with beautiful hidden depths.
Minneapolis Star-Tribune


A fascinating and utterly immersive reading experience that speaks volumes about the author’s creative process and delivers insights in droves...compulsively readable and wacky…. [Bennett has] diffused our often confusing and chaotic world into something more manageable, yet all the while making itty-bitty molehills into mountains
San Francisco Chronicle


(Starred review.) [F]ascinating.... Never do we glean [the narrator's] 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.
Publishers Weekly


(Starred review.) Innovative and elegant...In her celebration of minutiae, Bennett recreates the experience of a believable, uniquely captivating persona.  Pond deserves to be discovered and dived into, so thoroughly does Bennett submerge readers into her meticulously dazzling world.
Booklist


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.
Kirkus Reviews

Discussion Questions
We'll add publisher questions if and when they're available; in the meantime, consider these LitLovers talking points to help start a discussion for Pond...then take off on your own:

1. As reader, how well do you feel you know the narrator of Pond. She is never named, nor does any other voice describe her to us except for the final chapter. What do we learn about her? Choose any, or all, of the book's 20 chapters and talk about what each tells us about her.

2.  What is the narrator doing in her cottage by the sea? She talks about her lack of ambition and says that "real events don't make much difference to me." Is she hiding? Escaping? If so, from what? Is she seeking solace in solitude (.except that she interacts with others and his wi-fi)?

3. Think about the first story's little girl who climbs over a wall into a garden and falls asleep, suggesting an Alice in Wonderland quality to the stories. What are the instances in which the narrator finds enchantment in the smallest or most basic and ordinary things.

4. The stories are infused with a sense of loss, personal and professional. How does she frame those experiences, "the essential brutality of love," and what we come to learn about the various episodes in her life and how they affect her?

5. The narrator tells us that childhood is when one should...

develop the facility to really notice things so that, over time, and with enough practice, one ...can experience the enriching joy of moving about in deep and direct accordance with things." What does she mean to live in "deep accordance with things?

Is it possible to engage in the practice of "noticing things" in adulthood, or in adulthood do schuedels, duties, and egos take over our lives?

6. What is the narrator's relationship with men and sex. Consider, for instance, her attitude toward rape in the story titled, "Morning 1908."

7. Where do you find humor in the book? What about "Oh, Tomato Puree" or "Stir-Fry"?

8. In "Control Knobs" the narator wonders what it would feel like to be the last woman alive. Referring to a such character in a novel, the narrator claims she would like "to be undone in just the way she is being undone." What does she mean?

9. What are some of the comparisons you see with Thoreau's Walden Pond, which Bennett might be nodding to in her book's title?

(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)

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