Pond

ôA sharp, funny, and eccentric debut à Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. à [It]reminds us that small things have great depths.öûNew York Times Book Review "Dazzlingàexquisitely written and daring ." ûO, the Oprah Magazine Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise BennettÆs 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 experienceùfrom the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cowsùrendered 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 disappointmentsùthe ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover. As the narratorÆs 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.

• | Author: Claire-Louise Bennett
• | Publisher: Riverhead Books
• | Publication Date: Jul 11, 2017
• | Number of Pages: 208 pages
• | Language: English
• | Binding: Paperback/Fiction
• | ISBN-10: 0399575901
• | ISBN-13: 9780399575907