55. Pond | Claire-Louise Bennett

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Friends,

This is Claire-Louise’s first book - a short story collection titled Pond. Her writing is both dark and hilarious, I loved all 20 short stories! I was drawn to the description on the Fitzcarraldo Editions website (quoted below) as I too, am embracing a solitudinous life in a coastal town. Bennett has written¹ that “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.”

Feverish and forthright, Pond is an absorbing chronicle of the pitfalls and pleasures of a solitudinous life told by an unnamed woman living on the cusp of a coastal town.

The stories are not linked with any particular theme, each one is a different and intimate reflection into how the author interprets the small, daily moments of her life.

In one story, she needs to find a new control knob for her oven, and the project makes her think of the “knack of living,” the “magic of dying,” the greasiness of this hypothetical suicide method, and what it would be like to be the last woman in the world. Then she discovers that the knobs have been discontinued. “I feel quite at a loss for about ten minutes and it’s a sensation, I realise, that is not entirely dissimilar to indifference. So, naturally, I handle it rather well.”

I’ve dog-eared a few of my favourite paragraphs as they made me chuckle while reading:

THE BIG DAY

English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way. I haven’t yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things. I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don’t think my first language can be written down at all. I’m not sure it can be made external you see. I think it has to stay where it is; simmering in the elastic gloom betwixt my flickering organs.

STIR-FRY

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.

POSTCARD

It is raining now and a bra strap has slipped down which is perfect. The sound of frogs now seems completely perfect at last. Like the sound of a vagina, because, after all, we would be cavorting now. All the windows are open and all the shutters are folded back and I can hear the rain and I can hear the frogs of course — they don’t sound much like you think they would, not at all — I would never have been able to find a way to explain to you this sound they are making — but now it is perfectly obvious, it is the sound of my vagina.

Claire-Louise Bennett on writing Pond

‘I began to write – not to make sense of things, the opposite in fact. I wrote in order to keep rationality and purpose at bay, to prolong and bask in the rhythmic chaos of existence, and luxuriate in the magnificent mystery of everything’

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1. “Solitude, by its nature, doesn’t have much of a plot and it doesn’t throw up too many events either. Life, from the outside, becomes rather small. Yet in that tight spot one’s awareness and sensitivity intensifies to such an extent that the daily round, no matter how unvarying it has become, is a conduit to a more transcendent contact with reality so that, for example, objects are not simply insensate functional things, but materials, substances, which have an aura, an energy – even, occasionally, a numinosity.”