Pond - by Claire-Louise Bennett (Paperback)

About the Book

"A tour de force fiction debut, darkly humorous and utterly original, in which the habits and observations of a solitary young woman illuminate her inner life with uncanny, irresistible intimacy"--

Book Synopsis

"A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut ... Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. ... [It]reminds us that small things have great depths."-New York Times Book Review

"Dazzling...exquisitely written and daring ." -O, the Oprah Magazine

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.

Review Quotes

Praise for Pond

"[An] auspicious debut ... 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... Sometimes first novels like Pond are one-offs. They deliver a voice the author can't tap again. 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." -The New York Times

"Imagine a short-story collection written by Emily Dickinson, and you'll get the weird genius of this book." -The Boston Globe

"A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut ... one of those books so odd and vivid they make your own life feel strangely remote. Somehow, Bennett has written a fantasy novel for grownups that is a kind of extended case for living an existence that threatens to slip out of tune...Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent ... [It]reminds us that small things have great depths." -The New York Times Book Review

"A work of fiction that will make you feel pleasantly insane...Like Lydia Davis, Bennett...takes a state of mind closely associated with madness and places it in settings that are utterly domestic, mundane. The result is fervid and fearful...It is also funny...unnerving... sensitive to the point of being porous...lucid, practical, and excruciatingly cognizant of what is normal." -The New Yorker

"Dazzling...[an] exquisitely written and daring debut work of fiction...Pond's lovely strangeness lies in just how intimate we feel with our heroine despite knowing so little about her. By eschewing exposition, Bennett's novel demonstrates the elucidating power of simply recording a consciousness at work, a state of being - a 'mind in motion.'" -O, the Oprah Magazine

"The sort of avant-garde opus destined to put its author on the map alongside modern-day prose stylists of the highest order...The tilt of Bennett's pen (or the stroke of her key) lends gravity to anything it touches... This collection is for wiseasses and weirdos, a cathedral of strange sentences... built upon the singular experience of being a human being. It contains only sharp observations and a constant juggling between beauty and decay, moments stretched and skewed like leaded glass...Pond sparkles with witty one-liners...[a] gorgeous book." -Los Angeles Review of Books

"This Woolfian novella will challenge all your ideas of narrative. Dreamlike fragments of a life drift in and out of frame, with startling prose that will make your usual perspective feel like sleepwalking." -Elle

"Bennett's prose--ardent, addictively obsessive-compulsive, a little feral--is from another galaxy, or maybe another century." -Vogue

"Innovative, beguiling...meditative...a fresh new voice from seemingly out of nowhere... a lovely retreat from the cacophony of contemporary life." -Los Angeles Times

"Smart, funny, elliptical Pond expressed [Bennett's] unique sensibility in deceptively simply, delightfully unsettled prose. We'll be hearing more from this formidably gifted young writer." -The Boston Globe

"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

"Elegant and intoxicating ...rich with strange, sensuous and exhilarating moods and textures... 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

"[A] cool, curious dive into a world of minutiae... intense, and often wickedly funny." -Christian Science Monitor

"Immediately, the prose in Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond feels new but deeply familiar -- like the voice in your head but dialed just to the left. You are dropped into the book without your wits about you, and you may not totally recover them. It's exhilarating ...I think someone should award [Bennett] a great prize so that she can write us all something new." -NYMag's The Cut

"Muddiness is not typically a positive description for a narrative, but this mud is sparkling, full of mica and minerals that glitter with color when the sun's rays hit. It's through this glistening mud that Bennett's readers get to mudlark, mucking about in prose that is alternatively deliberate and crisp, surrealistic and unknowable, to find real gems of observation and language... deeply satisfying and refreshing." -New Republic

"Sharp and witty...wonderfully discursive." -The Millions

"Reminiscent of Norwegian writer Karl Knausgård as much as it is Thoreau and Zadie Smith." -Refinery29

"Compelling [and] innovative ...Bennett's unique portrait of a persona emerges with an intensity and vision not often seen, or felt, in a debut." -Poets & Writers

"Pond, in its quirky structure and language, calls to mind the Irish fathers of literary modernism Joyce and Beckett. But then it also echoes Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Carroll's Alice, Thoreau's Walden and, more contemporarily, Strout's Olive Kitteridge, as well as anything by Nicholson Baker...Bennett's narrator is a funny, self-deprecating, observant, opinionated, earthy woman whose mind grasps every detailed string of her rural life and gives it a pull to reveal her curiosity and contented solitude...What a treasure, this woman!" -Shelf Awareness

"Innovative and elegant... Pond deserves to be discovered and dived into, so thoroughly does Bennett submerge readers into her meticulously dazzling world." -Booklist (starred)

"Captivating...Bennett has achieved something strange, unique, and undeniably wonderful." -Publisher's Weekly (starred)

"What Bennett aims at is nothing short of a re-enchantment of the world... This is a truly stunning debut, beautifully written and profoundly witty." -The Guardian

"A touch of William Gaddis. A touch of Lydia Davis. A touch of Samuel Beckett. A touch of Edna O'Brien. And yet Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond feels entirely unique. Quiet and luxurious all at once." --Colum McCann

"Claire-Louise Bennett sets the conventions of literary fiction ablaze in this ferociously intelligent and funny debut. Don't be fooled by Pond's small size. It contains multitudes." --Jenny Offill

"As brilliant a debut and as distinct a voice as we've heard in years--this is a real writer with the real goods."--Kevin Barry

About the Author

Claire-Louise Bennett's short fiction and essays have been published in The Moth, The Irish Times, and other publications. She was awarded the inaugural White Review Short Story Prize in 2013. Pond is her first book. Bennett lives in Galway, Ireland.