![]() I read it twice in quick succession, then again a week later like a favorite bottle of wine. ![]() In the end, I don’t entirely know where I end up-under the earth somewhere or gazing back at my own reflection through a cracked mirror. It isn’t the what of living, but the how of telling that carves the deepest ravine proof we are here. In Bennett’s world, living comes at you directly “a clamoring store of images in the clear open spaces of your mind,” threading the mundane particulars into a shimmering map. It will, instead, leave you wondering about your own life: how it’s felt in the deepest flickering spaces of your body and made present. ![]() Unfolding over twelve stories, all narrated by the same unnamed female protagonists, this novel will not answer any of your questions. To read Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond is to experience many incongruous sensations at once: that of wading through mud-opulent and surprising the way mud can only be experienced as a child the feeling of watching landscapes flit across a windshield until you’re utterly displaced from your surroundings, your mind tipping back and forth between thoughts and finally, that of trying to get somewhere and, having only an impression of where you want to get, feeling your way back: hand over cool rock, tongue edging each sharp thing, ear to every dip of the narrator’s mind. ![]()
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