I go on with my guillotining and methodically pare down this robust gathering of swanky solanums until they lose colour. While often the sound is “mellow and euphonious,” late at night, she writes, I often felt a sense of unease as I read, since it seemed the narrator, fascinated as she is by the world, isn’t quite sure she wants to be part of it. Sometimes she’s quite funny, offering her opinion on the proper kind of tea cup (white, chipped in the right places), rhapsodizing about tomato paste (it is indeed a terribly overlooked ingredient), fretting over the deteriorating knobs on her very old and tiny stove sometimes she seems terribly sad, too much alone, despite how much she enjoys solitude (and despite the fact that she mentions friends and lovers with some regularity). That’s because the book is really about a mind observing itself I never knew in which direction the mildly misanthropic narrator’s mind would go as she considers her relationships to places and objects. As these seemingly quotidian activities suggest, nothing dramatic happens in Pond, exactly-and yet it’s still riveting. In self-conscious stream of consciousness, the narrator reflects on gardening, visiting her neighbors, drinking, taking a bath during a storm, the proper way to eat porridge. Bennett takes us inside the mind of an unnamed narrator, a woman living alone in a cottage on the coast of Ireland. In these twenty pieces, some a page or two long (or less), some the length of more traditional short stories, Ms. I suppose, given its length, that you might think of it as vignettes organized into a novella.

It’s not quite a novel in the sense that we’re used to thinking about novels (with a plot or a trajectory, even), but neither is it a collection of short stories nor is it prose poetry (though it makes the ordinary somehow unreal, a quality I associate with poetry). Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond* is the most unusual book I’ve read in years.

Pond bennett