Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett (2015): A Review

Title: Pond

Author: Claire-Louise Bennett

Publication Year: 2015

Rating: ⭐⭐⭐

Pages: 148

Source: ebook

Genre: literary fiction, Short story, poetry, Modernist Fiction

Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett initially felt like Virginia Woolf’s stream of consciousness after someone removed the banks, redirected the river, and declined to inform the reader.

Even its classification is uncertain: linked short stories, a novel, or one woman’s thoughts refusing to observe conventional boundaries? We have an unnamed female narrator, but please do not mistake that information for a stable foundation.

At first, I loved it. The confusion was peculiar, delightful, and occasionally delicious. Ordinary objects received extraordinary attention, thoughts wandered into unexpected territory, and the narrator’s comparisons made me wonder how anyone could look at the same world I inhabit and arrive at those conclusions.

I wanted to understand her. Who was this woman? Why did her observations keep becoming so unsettling? Was I reading domestic reflection, an elaborate private joke, or something that might eventually require the neighbours to give statements?

To be clear, that last possibility belonged to my increasingly suspicious imagination. The book was not promising me a crime. I was simply becoming concerned about the company I was keeping.
What Bennett does brilliantly is make consciousness itself the subject. Place, objects, memory, desire, and solitude become entangled through associations that are beautifully precise and frequently bizarre. Almost nothing needs to happen because the narrator can make an ordinary moment feel sufficiently eventful, intimate, and alarming.

For roughly half the book, I was happy to follow. I enjoyed not knowing where we were going. I admired the prose and trusted that my questions might eventually lead somewhere.

Unfortunately, my questions began reproducing faster than the book could acknowledge them.
I was not expecting a conventional plot or a final explanation of every strange thought. But I did begin to want some development in my relationship with the narrator: another perspective, a shift, something beyond increasingly elaborate access to a mind I still could not quite locate.

The same uncertainty that initially fascinated me eventually exhausted me. By the final twenty pages, my patience had left, and I skipped through the rest. An embarrassing end to a book I began with such enthusiasm, but apparently my tolerance for literary bewilderment is not as inexhaustible as the bewilderment itself.

For a while, books like this one and Ali Smith’s genuinely excite me. I admire the experimentation, enjoy the strange associations, and appreciate being asked to read differently. Then, somewhere along the way, fascination becomes fatigue. What initially felt inventive starts to feel like another demand on a brain already considering early retirement.

Right now, I want a classic short story or a novel with a realistic plot: recognisable people doing identifiable things, preferably in an order I can follow. I need a break from postmodern and late-modernist uncertainty. These books have begun to exhaust me so thoroughly that I sometimes avoid reading altogether.

I still admire Bennett’s distinctive voice and her ability to make the ordinary feel unfamiliar. For a while, this was exactly the kind of strange reading experience I wanted.

Then the delightful confusion became compulsory attendance.

I enjoyed visiting this consciousness. I simply stayed longer than I should have.