Pond / Claire-Louise Bennett

Bennett, Claire-Louise, author

Book

First Riverhead trade paperback edition

New York : Riverhead Books, 2017

©2015

195 pages ; 21 cm

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

Single women -- Fiction.

Villages -- Fiction.

Young women -- Fiction

Short stories.

Psychological fiction.

Short stories. Selections

Voyage in the dark -- Morning, noon & night -- First thing -- The big day -- Wishful thinking -- A little before seven -- To a god unknown -- Two weeks since -- Stir-fry -- Finishing touch -- Control knobs -- Postcard -- The deepest sea -- Oh, tomato puree! -- Morning, 1908 -- The gloves are off -- Over & done with -- Words escape me -- Lady of the house -- Old ground

9780399575891 (hardcover)

0399575901 (paperback)

9780399575907 (paperback)

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