Claire-Louise Bennett
Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett lies somewhere between a novel and a collection of short stories. It consists of a series of chapters or fragments, varying in length, in which the first-person narrator pours out her thoughts.
The unnamed narrator lives in a coastal town in Ireland (“the most westerly point of Europe, right next to the Atlantic Ocean”). Her rambling, stream-of-consciousness thoughts explore the minutiae of everyday objects, surroundings, and activities. She engages in extensive navel-gazing, analyzing her thoughts in minute, step-by-step detail. She is also painfully self-conscious, second-guessing herself and her interactions with others. She will occasionally drop oblique hints about her appearance, education, and love life. Articulate and intelligent, she has a dry sense of humor that surfaces in the most unexpected times.
She has a keen eye for observing even the most trivial details and recording them. A whole chapter is dedicated to her faulty cooker knobs. Her keen eye for detail extends to her natural surroundings. She charts the passage of a beetle as it skirts across her forehead and listens to a spider moving through the grass. Nature assumes an almost mythic quality in some of her descriptions. In between her rambling thoughts and convoluted sentences, she will hit you with a prescient insight that can take your breath away.
Whether you like the novel or not depends on what you think of the narrator. Some readers may lose patience with her and dismiss the novel as a pretentious exercise. Others will enjoy getting inside the skin of a narrator who is intense, intelligent, funny, observant, self-aware, and who reflects on and delights in the mundane.
Recommended.