AJ Dunn Reads

  Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett In Pond , an unnamed English woman lives alone in a small cottage in western Ireland where she muses through twenty short stories, which are more like snippets of her solitary life. She talks about bananas and oatcakes, Spanish oranges after sex, taking a bath, the missing knobs on her small oven. The woman focuses on the small things in her life, or simple things that happen to her that her mind takes on tangents, lifting the mundane into the extraordinary. It is not a novel that is easy to classify. The prose is meandering and beautiful, with a touch of the classic style where commas and asides are prevalent. At times it reads like a journal, at others like short story. It is a novel full of atmosphere. And atmosphere is what Bennett herself cites in a discussion with Philip Maughan from The Paris Review in an interview about the book. Bennett talks about solitude as lending itself to atmosphere because being alone is "nullifying, terrifying...