Claire-Louise Bennett

Feverish and forthright, Pond is an absorbing chronicle of the pitfalls and pleasures of a solitudinous life told by an unnamed woman living on the cusp of a coastal town. Broken bowls, belligerent cows, swanky aubergines, trembling moonrises and horrifying sunsets, the physical world depicted in these stories is unsettling yet intimately familiar and soon takes on a life of its own. Captivated by the stellar charms of seclusion but restless with desire, the woman’s relationship with her surroundings becomes boundless and increasingly bewildering. Claire-Louise Bennett’s startlingly original first collection slips effortlessly between worlds and is by turns darkly funny and deeply moving.

Stories

Pond

Marion

It had something to do with love. About the essential brutality of love. About those adventitious souls who deliberately seek out love as a prime agent of total self-immolation. Yes, that's right. It attempted to show that in the whole history of literature love is quite routinely depicted as an engulfing process of ecstatic suffering which finally, mercifully, obliterates us and delivers us to oblivion. Dismembered and packed off. 

Emiley Jones

That the desire to come apart irrevocably will always be as strong as, if not stronger than, the drive to establish oneself. As deep as ink and black, black as the deepest sea.

And each sound was a rung that took me further upwards, and in this way it was possible for me to get up really high, to climb up past the clouds, towards a bird-like exuberance, where there is nothing at all but continuous light and acres of blue.

If we have lost the knack of living, I thought, it is a safe bet to presume we have forfeited the magic of dying.

Everyone has seen a sunset—I will not attempt to describe the precise visual delineations of this one. Neither will I set down any of the things that scudded across my mind when the earth's trajectory became so discernibly and disarmingly attested to. Peculiar things, yet intimately familiar.

Impressions of something I have not perhaps experienced directly. Memories I arrived with. Memories that snuck in and tucked up and live on within and throughout me.

He said he was fed up, or something like that, and I said I was too—he seemed to think it had to do with how the weather had been the same for two weeks. I was inclined to believe it had more to do with how our lives had been more or less the same for much longer.

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, perhaps wondering what or who was taking them in.

And didn't I immediately discover that melancholia brought something out in me that felt more authentic and effortless than anything I'd previously alchemised.

Pond quotes

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