Morning is apostrophized as an entity, and brings with it a 'blank card' with which it moves the dirt beneath its nails. An apple figures prominently in this prelapsarian garden where, in the last sentence, we learn that morning has arrived. In the last, a young girl closes the earth over 'papers' before returning home to wash her hands. In the first chapter, 'Voyage in the Dark,' a girl, a child, falls to sleep in a garden. I'll merely add that the sequence of loosely connected sections forming the bulk of the book, narrated by a young adult woman of indeterminate age in possession of hyperacute sensibilities that charge even the quotidian with meaning and interest, are bookended at front and rear by two chapters unlike any of the others, both of which feature a young girl. Prior reviewers in this train have called out essential qualities of the exquisitely self-aware narrator (using descriptors such as fey, quirky and off-kilter), and the Joycean stream of consciousness that informs her narration, wrought in lapidary Nabokovian prose.

Shimmering and unusual, Pond demands to be devoured in a single sitting that w … ( more) As the narratorâ?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. The effect is of character refracted and ventriloquized by environment, catching as it bounces her longings, frustrations, and disappointmentsâ?the ending of an affair, or the ambivalent beginning with a new lover. Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, it focuses on the details of her daily experienceâ?from the best way to eat porridge or bananas to an encounter with cowsâ?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.

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. Immediately upon its publication in Ireland, Claire-Louise Bennettâ?s debut began to attract attention well beyond the expectations of the tiny Irish press that published it. 'Dazzlingâ?¦exquisitely written and daring. â?¦ reminds us that small things have great depths.â?â? New York Times Book Review

HTML: â?A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut â?¦ Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent.

Pond claire