Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett

The first few pages of the critically acclaimed Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett open with the principle character revealing their favourite breakfast foods. “Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice”. Although I am partial to a banana, I don’t drink coffee. I find when I drink coffee it gives me a hyperactive interior monologue in my head for the rest of the day; a sort-of Virginia Woolf stream of consciousness, where I jitter about wondering, if like Mrs Dalloway, I should buy the flowers myself (I have entered a florist once in my lifetime).

So about fifty pages into Pond I decided that it would be better if Bennett’s character stuck to tea.

Tea wouldn’t result in a manic desire to place certain vegetables in certain bowls on certain windowsills. It wouldn’t produce a bizarre identification with the neighbour’s Portaloo and it wouldn’t create a wired isolated way of life which is unfathomable and completely unnecessary.

What I could glean from the book is that it is comprised of short stories voicing the musings of an unnamed woman who lives in a cottage on her own. The critics of the Literary Review claim Claire-Louise Bennett “privileges the modes of human experiences that are so often undervalued” – a real-world translation of this is that the author discusses the small things in life that often make up our experience, like tomato puree or broken cooking appliances.

I was ready to put this book down as literary guff until I came to page 65 to the story entitled “To A God Unknown”. The reclusive woman was reading in the bath. Reading in the bath is one of my all-time favourite things and as it happens I was reading in the bath at the time. The character had her window open to a storm outside and I thought the idea was so beautiful I wished it would rain so I could do the same.

I was following her train of thought for a few pages and then I got lost again.

I felt when I was reading this book that I was living inside someone else’s daydream. The daydream of someone I didn’t like very much. Just as I got settled I was jolted by the words like “kairotic” and “abnegation” that were dropped in the reverie’s rambling prose like status symbols. It was then I was aware that Bennett was talking and not the character and she was talking for a critical audience that wasn’t me.