Pond (2016)
Claire-Louise Bennett
195 pages
When I read or hear a review of a book that piques my interest, I add the title and author to a list on my phone, as a reminder for some future visit to a bookstore. Generally, even if months or years pass before I finally come across the book, reading the summary on its cover provides me a sufficient reminder of why it had caught my interest in the first place. Some entries on my list, however, have a question mark at the end of the title and author’s name: my notation for a review that intrigued me, but didn’t necessarily convince me. These are the cryptic entries on my list; when I finally encounter one of these titles in the bookstore, I have generally forgotten what had earlier caught my attention --- and, more importantly, what hesitations had tempered my interest.
So it was when I came across author Claire-Louise Bennett’s book Pond in the bookstore a couple of months ago --- it was on my list, but with one of those enigmatic question marks tacked on. Reviewing the summary on the dust jacket convinced me to go ahead and buy it, but left me with little clear notion of what I was wading into when I later opened it to begin reading. In particular, though I read the book as a novel, once I’d finished and sat down to write this review it dawned on me that perhaps it actually consists of a collection of short stories.
Ultimately it can be enjoyed either way, as a set of loosely related stories, or a kind of impressionistic and meandering novel. Bennett has structured the book as a series of vignettes, narrated by a young woman recalling and reflecting on moments in her life, from the mundane to the dramatic. Many of the woman’s recollections center on events in and around a small cottage she leases near the Atlantic coast of Ireland, a dwelling and landscape that she seems to inhabit deeply, with all her senses.
In one story she watches a storm pass over the mountains outside her window as she takes a bath, meditating on the storm’s relationship to the mountains which she imagines it to be revisiting. In another, after spending days sick in bed, she pulls on a coat over her nightgown and walks up a hill from her cottage to get some air; when, as she leans on a gate to enjoy the view of the countryside, a young man with the hood of his jacket pulled up walks toward her up the path, her initial, instinctive fear suddenly gives way to a fevered eroticism as she finds herself bridling again her natural caution and introverted passiveness.
These remembrances seem to pour out of the Bennett’s narrator --- stream of conscious accounts during which she veers off onto non sequiturs, gets distracted by details she can’t quite recall, and jumps back to fill in information that suddenly occurs to her, just as someone sharing a story with you over a cup of tea or a beer might do. In many of these recollections, she broods on the hidden meanings and implications in her relationships with neighbors, friends and boyfriends, meditations that verge on the obsessive as she sorts through her feelings.
In others, she paints lush, impressionistic portraits of the physical world in and around her cottage, exquisite and engaging descriptions that demonstrate an intimate and almost anthropomorphized perception of her surroundings and their impact on her life. Within her remarkable hyper-awareness, the boundaries between her inner musings and the world she inhabits can become fluid and uncertain:
There was a storm, an old storm, going around and around the mountain, visiting the mountains again perhaps after who knows how long, trying to get somewhere, going nowhere. And to begin with nothing, just a storm, nothing original, nothing I hadn’t heard before. I went about my business for a while until it struck me I should disconnect the cables and thus the lights went out on those small matters I endeavor to attend to and I didn’t mind very much because the matters were straightforward and already composed and yet were at the same time quite beyond me at that moment. It was of no great consequence really. I got into the water which had been waiting for some time, the temperature loosening, and then I had the idea about opening the window wide, which I did with no difficulty despite the rigid appearance of the clasp.
And then, from there, it was possible, unavoidable really, to listen to the storm going around and around, and I knew it was an old one that had come back --- it seemed to know exactly where it was and there was such intimacy in its movement and in the sound it made as it went along and around and around. Yes, I thought, you know those mountains and the mountains are familiar with you also. No --- it was not raging, it was not simply raging --- I heard no element of anger in fact. How loud it was and yet so fragile, stopping and starting for a long time --- it didn’t know where to begin, but it was by no means frantic, either, not at all. I moved a web of lather about the roots of my hair and became immersed in the body of the storm; I knew its structure, saw its eyes, felt its past, and I empathized with its entreaty. It had style, it was experienced; and it came back, and it came back again.
Going around and around, trying to get somewhere, going nowhere. And even though the mountain did nothing the mountain was not impervious to the storm and in fact dreaded its retreat and longed for it always to come back, and to come back again. (65-67)
Resist the temptation to try and tease a concrete plot out of Bennett’s tales in Pond. Instead, surrender to the meandering sensibility and colorful imagery of her story-telling, and so delight in her narrator’s keen, if often ambivalent, meditations on the fundamental ties that bind us to the natural world and the many people in our lives. And perhaps, as a reward, find yourself encouraged to look more deeply and intensely at even the most apparently quotidian details of daily life.
Other reviews / information:
Read quotes from this book here.
Have you read this book, others by this author, or even similar ones by other authors? I’d enjoy hearing your thoughts.
Other of my book reviews: FICTION Bookshelf and NON-FICTION Bookshelf
No comments:
Post a Comment