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Meghan O'Rourke
NYT SYNDICATE
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. It's also hard to categorise or even describe, which is part of its accomplishment. Initially published in 2015, to great acclaim, by an independent press in Ireland, Pond consists of 20 interconnected stories ” though they're more like soliloquies, or digressive meditations ” mostly narrated by the same reclusive, unnamed woman living alone in a cottage on what seems to be the west coast of Ireland.
The stories shun conventional narrative devices (like plot), instead dramatising the associative movement of the narrator's"mind in motion." Some are no more than a few paragraphs, capturing the shard of a sensation; others range across unlikely groups of subjects, from replacing the knobs on a cooktop to suicide. Stir-Fry reads, in full:"I just threw my dinner in the bin. I knew as I was making it I was going to do that, so I put in it all the things I never want to see again."
In an essay last year for The Irish Times, Bennett wrote,"In solitude you don't need to make an impression on the world, so the world has some opportunity to make an impression on you." Accordingly Pond tries to reach insight by way of defamiliarisation: Ordinary incidents take on a special light because they are investigated more deeply than they would be in more conventional stories (at times these pieces reminded me of Francis Ponge's fables; Bennett has also been compared to Lydia Davis, though she's more ruminative and digressive a writer). In Control Knobs, for example, the narrator describes the frustration of watching the knobs on top of her stove crack in two, so that she has to move the single remaining knob from cooker to cooker, waiting for it, too, to fail. (The stove is so old there don't seem to be any replacement parts easily available to her.) Another story, Morning, 1908, riskily meditates on the question of whether being raped would really be that terrible or whether one could have a kind of animal indifference to it.
Over the course of Pond we learn almost nothing about the specifics of the narrator's life ” she left academia behind, there have been interludes with men that ended painfully ” but the stories do seem interestingly haunted by the scar-lattice of failed relationships."Morning, Noon and Night" begins as a disquisition on the ideal breakfast:"Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice. It ought not to be too ripe ” in fact there should be a definite remainder of green along the stalk, and if there isn't, forget about it. .u8200?.u8200?. Oatcakes along with it can be nice, the rough sort." But by the end of the piece, she has meditated on"the essential brutality of love"."It was wonderful. I'd never done that before. .u8200?.u8200?. And that really was what made them so exciting ” using language in a way I'd not used it before, to transcribe such an intimate area of my being that I'd never before attempted to linguistically lay bare."
You might be wondering ” at times I did ” why any of this is any good. Sometimes the writing doesn't quite coalesce into transporting insight. But the book's preoccupation with a kind of studied ridding oneself of the superego/organised social self that comes with being an adult works on you, slowly, making you question why so many of our everyday experiences go undescribed. Stylistically, it makes you aware of language as a kind of scar-lattice too, with a damaged history of its own.
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.
Reading Pond, I also thought of David Markson's avant-garde novel Wittgenstein's Mistress, about a woman who is persuaded she is the only woman left on earth, leaving us to wonder whether or not she is mad. Just as that novel sprung to mind, the narrator of Control Knobs began to reflect on what seems to be Marlen Haushofer's 1960s novel The Wall, another book about a woman who is the last person on earth, and who is trying to survive as long as she can. Bennett's narrator makes the case that the novel she's talking about is not"dystopian" at all but a story of"survival, and the grievous psychological ramifications and gruelling practical exigencies occasioned by confinement." Indeed, the narrator says,"you want to be undone in just the way she is being undone. .u8200?.u8200?. It is like a last daydream from childhood in many ways," because it is"taken up hopefully with .u8200?.u8200?. boundless fantasies of danger and solitude."
What is at stake in the difference between the dystopian novel and the novel of survival? In some ways, the stories in Pond amount to a kind of manifesto insisting we are missing the very point of our lives: Adulthood's melancholy, its losses, its scars, are its most meaningful elements, they seem to suggest. To experience confinement in a body that travels in one direction through time is to be wounded, but somewhat magically so. Somehow, this is connected, for the narrator, to the wild empty imaginings of childhood.
The book's title is drawn from a story about preparations for an unspecified"big day" (perhaps a wedding) on the property. Someone places a sign that says POND beside the small, shallow pond ” an action the narrator finds unforgivable."I can't help but assess the situation from the child's perspective. And quite frankly I would be disgusted to the point of taking immediate vengeance if I was brought to a purportedly magical place one afternoon in late September and thereupon belted down to the pond, all by myself most likely, only to discover the word pond scrawled on a poxy piece of damp plywood right there beside it." Why does it matter? Because all these attempts to label, name and stave off accidents are part of the"moronic busybodying" that adulthood preoccupies itself with instead of remaining open to the marvellous accident and inhuman strangeness of life on this planet.
Childhood, the narrator reflects, is a time"to develop the facility to really notice things so that, over time, and with enough practice, one becomes attuned to the earth's embedded logos and can experience the enriching joy of moving about in deep and direct accordance with things." There is a kind of existential tension here, because of course adults are meant to become adult. Pond ” which can be mordantly funny ” is haunted by a feeling of semi-tragedy, a quality of loss that's hard to put one's finger on.
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27/07/2016
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