![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Pond concerns itself with the lot of an intense intellect as she nurses the bruises from a falling-out with the academy and constructs a world in which her irksome relationships with language and structure become her greatest assets. Yet she can’t help but anticipate their “alien and absurd” results, some of which are chronicled in this twenty-part miscellany. I think it has to stay where it is simmering in the elastic gloom betwixt my flickering organs.” For the time being, she writes in English with a warped dexterity that achieves startling descriptions of an “avuncular” sky, a car park that smells “exclusively of dishcloths,” and wanting Christmas to “slump backwards into its shambolic velvet envelope.” When she voices words, she tells us, they usually become “misshapen” and not at all what she had in mind. “I’m not sure it can be made external you see. Here, she has given herself over to a ripe compulsion to grammatize her experience of the world. ![]() “Regrettably I don’t think my first language can be written down at all,” explains the unnamed narrator of Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut novel Pond, which leaves us in the idle hands of a woman who has abandoned academe and retreated, alone, to a stone cottage in the Irish countryside. ![]()
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