{"id":6150,"date":"2015-12-28T11:36:14","date_gmt":"2015-12-28T11:36:14","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=6150"},"modified":"2015-12-29T12:52:33","modified_gmt":"2015-12-29T12:52:33","slug":"pond-by-claire-louise-bennett","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/?p=6150","title":{"rendered":"Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Published by The Stinging Fly Press 23 April 2015 <\/strong><\/p>\n

156pp, paperback, \u00a310.99<\/strong><\/p>\n

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/strong><\/p>\n

Click here to buy this book<\/a><\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

Writing out of solitude can be a risky business.\u00a0 For one thing, being alone brings on intensity.\u00a0 How can we be sure that anyone outside will care?<\/p>\n

In this first collection of stories , Claire-Louise Bennett\u2019s unnamed \u00a0female narrator (I shall call her \u2018B\u2019) reports from a place to which she has withdrawn in order to think, write and collect herself. \u00a0From the first piece (in which little girls go trespassing), to the last (in which \u2018morning waits on its high swing\u2019), we know we are in the hands of someone who pays great attention to the world and is often rewarded with a kind of ecstasy.\u00a0 Unusually, she is also very funny.<\/p>\n

B writes of domestic minutiae, mostly with relish.\u00a0 Fruit in bowls, bowls on sills, the making of breakfast: she praises these, as she investigates their essence.\u00a0 On occasion\u00a0 –\u00a0 as in \u2018Control Knobs\u2019, a long riff about her clapped-out oven\u00a0 –\u00a0 she follows a trail of thought into far outlandishness, imagining what it would be to be the last woman in the world, with supplies (let alone access to new oven parts) running out. She is fascinated with objects (pens, for example) and writes a great piece on abandoned clutter, disturbed when her landlady turns out the contents of an outbuilding.\u00a0 This being B\u2019s clutter, the piece de resistance<\/em> is an old despairing love letter from a lapsed admirer.<\/p>\n

Handling relationships is one of B\u2019s central themes.\u00a0 In \u2018A Little Before Seven\u2019, she is preparing for an encounter with an individual man.\u00a0 In \u2018The Big Day\u2019, she decides to avoid the general public.\u00a0 In \u2018Finishing Touch\u2019, she is throwing a party, one not<\/em> intended for those people who are \u2018hell-bent on getting to the bottom of you\u2019.\u00a0 For B is eccentric, and she knows it (\u2018And so what!\u2019, you hear her cry).<\/p>\n

For all her attentiveness to the world around her (the sound of cows \u2018rearranging themselves\u2019, the \u2018whack\u2019 of the woodpigeon\u2019s wings, raindrops attached to fronds of grass \u2018like a \"\"<\/a>squandered chandelier dashed headlong down the hillside\u2019), B is ambivalent on the subject of being looked at herself.\u00a0 She loves dressing up, in its season (though is more often to be found garbed in \u2018a particularly shabby coat\u2019); she fantasizes about being seduced by a passing stranger; she travels some distance to give a perfectly well-referenced but unconventional talk about the language of love at an academic conference.\u00a0 However, she also talks about displacement, of belonging and not belonging in a place, of loneliness.\u00a0 This, it seems to me, is the corollary of her honest and exacting attention to life, so different from the brash approach of those who like to get to grips with it, \u2018refusing to let anything come between them and the rest of it<\/em>\u2019 (my italics).<\/p>\n

Sensuous, thoughtful, yet shot through with merriment (see her ode to tomato puree and her comments on laziness), these bulletins from seclusion provoke as well as celebrate. \u00a0Published by the Dublin press who gave us Kevin Barry, Mary Costello and Colin Barrett, they make you long to see what Bennett will do next.<\/p>\n

To be published in the UK in October 2015 by Fitzcarraldo<\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Reviewed by Alison Burns<\/p>\n

* A 2015 Notable Book<\/p>\n

In this first collection of stories , Claire-Louise Bennett\u2019s unnamed female narrator (I shall call her \u2018B\u2019) reports from a place to which she has withdrawn in order to think, write and collect herself. From the first piece (in which little girls go trespassing), to the last (in which \u2018morning waits on its high swing\u2019), we know we are in the hands of someone who pays great attention to the world and is often rewarded with a kind of ecstasy. Unusually, she is also very funny […] in Stories<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[18,19,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-6150","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-new-fiction-and-non-fiction","category-notable-books","category-reviews"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6150","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6150"}],"version-history":[{"count":7,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6150\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6156,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6150\/revisions\/6156"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6150"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6150"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/bookoxygen.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6150"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}