“Pond” by Claire-Louise Bennett

This collection of short stories is one of the gems of Fitzcarraldo Editions. It is a continual bestseller. In the title story, Bennett declares, “If it were left up to me I wouldn’t put a sign next to a pond saying pond, either I’d write something else, such as Pig Swill, or I wouldn’t bother at all…. It’s not that I want children to fall into the pond per se, though I can’t really see what harm it would do them; it’s that I can’t help but assess the situation from the child’s perspective. And quite frankly I would be disgusted to the point of taking immediate vengeance if I was brought to a purportedly magical place one afternoon in late September and thereupon belted down to the pond, all by myself most likely, only to discover the word pond scrawled on a poxy piece of damp plywood right there beside it. Oh I’d be hopping. That sort of moronic busy-bodying happens with such galling regularity throughout childhood of course.”

An unnamed female narrator voices all of the stories in this collection. She is a writer, living at the farthest edge of western Ireland, near Galway, in a leased ramshackle stone cottage away from the world. The stories vary in length from a single paragraph to twenty or so pages. They detail everyday life and thought. Each is tight, in a sense, and yet, these stories are full of asides, digressions, loops, and quick mental jumps. “English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way. I haven’t yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things. I expect I will always have to do it that way; regrettably I don’t think my first language can be written down at all. I’m not sure it can be made external you see. I think it has to stay where it is; simmering in the elastic gloom betwixt my flickering organs.” The luxury, enchantment, and precision of Bennett’s prose make the mundane as propulsive to read as any teleological plot, which seems completely besides the point. “And even though it was almost completely dark by now I opened a notebook by the fire and wrote some things down…. There were lines across the pages but they were imperceptible because of how dark it had become and once a word was written it was quite irretrievable, as if abducted. I went on, sinking words into the pages.”