5/21/2023 0 Comments Pond claire louise bennett review![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() She marks time, when looking back, by which writers she had and had not yet read. She revels in that ability, but knows its dark side well: At one point, she announces that she will not read books by women who died by suicide because "I think it is very likely that I will one day kill myself and if I do I want it to be all my own idea."īennett portrays her narrator as a woman for whom life and ideas are, essentially, not separable. Her powers of association are such that describing a whisk takes her, in two bubbling lines, from frothy batter to ballerinas leaping through the air. Bennett's protagonist, who is a quiet, working-class woman in flight from anything familiar, knows herself to be intensely suggestible. Indeed, the novel is explicitly committed to the privacy of thought. It is, very loosely, a fictional autobiography via reading - a form that risks triteness or cliché, but Bennett is too committed to the oddity and specificity of her again-nameless narrator's ideas to ever fall into the worn grooves of other people's. Book Reviews A true crime writer struggles with his responsibility to the victims in 'Devil House'Īs Pond used daily tasks as routes inside its nameless protagonist's mind, so Checkout 19 uses books. ![]()
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