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Checkout 19, March 2022
Hardcover / e-Book
Pond, July 2016
Hardcover / e-Book
Riverhead Books
July 2016
On Sale: July 12, 2016
208 pages
ISBN: 0399575898
EAN: 9780399575891
Kindle: B017SCQKW4
Hardcover / e-Book
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Women's Fiction | Novella / Short Story
Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise
Bennett’s debut began to attract attention well beyond the
expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. A deceptively slender volume, it captures with utterly
mesmerizing virtuosity the interior reality of its unnamed
protagonist, a young woman living a singular and mostly
solitary existence on the outskirts of a small coastal
village. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it
focuses on the details of her daily experience—from the best
way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with
cows—rendered sometimes in story-length, story-like
stretches of narrative, sometimes in fragments no longer
than a page, but always suffused with the hypersaturated,
almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world that we
remember from childhood. The effect is of character
refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it
bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointments—the
ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new
lover. As the narrator’s persona emerges in all its eccentricity,
sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help
but see mirrored there our own fraught desires and
limitations, and our own fugitive desire, despite
everything, to be known. Shimmering and unusual, POND demands to be devoured in a
single sitting that will linger long after the last page.
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