A sharp funny and eccentric debut … Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer
of real talent. … [It]reminds us that small things have great depths.-New York Times Book
Review Dazzling…exquisitely written and daring . -O the Oprah Magazine 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.
