Advanced
Error loading page.
Try refreshing the page. If that doesn't work, there may be a network issue, and you can use our self test page to see what's preventing the page from loading.
Learn more about possible network issues or contact support for more help.
Title details for Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett - Available

Pond

by Claire-Louise Bennett
Lucy Rayner
Audiobook
1 of 1 copy available
Borrow Listen to a sample Listen to a sample
1 of 1 copy available
In Claire-Louise Bennett's shimmering debut, an unnamed young woman—wry, somewhat misanthropic, keenly observant—chronicles her life on the outskirts of a small coastal village. The charms of bananas and oatcakes in the morning and Spanish oranges after sex; the small pleasures and anxieties of throwing a party, exchanging salacious emails with a new lover, sitting in the bath as it storms outside. Broken oven knobs prompt a meditation on survival that's both haunting and playful; a sunset walk leads to an unsettling encounter with a herd of cows; the discovery of an old letter recalls an impossible affair.

Sidestepping the usual conventions of narrative, Pond refracts the narrator's uncannily intimate experience in the details of daily life, rendered sometimes in story-like stretches, sometimes in fragments, and suffused with the almost synesthetic intensity of the physical world as we remember it from childhood. As her persona emerges in all its particularity, sometimes painfully and often hilariously, we cannot help seeing mirrored there our own fraught longings, our own fugitive desire, despite everything, to be known.

Enchanting and unusual, Pond will linger long after the last page.

  • Creators

  • Publisher

  • Release date

    August 2, 2016

  • Formats

    • OverDrive Listen audiobook

      • ISBN: 9781515929925
      • File size: 139776 KB
      • Duration: 04:51:11

  • Languages

    • English

  • Levels

    • Lexile® Measure: 1360
    • Text Difficulty: 11-12

  • Reviews

    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from May 2, 2016
      Bennett's debut is a fascinating slim volume that eschews traditional narrative conventions to offer 20 mostly linked sectionsâit's impossible to classify them strictly as chapters or storiesânarrated by a nameless woman living in a small cottage in rural Ireland. The sections vary in length, with some as short as a few sentences, and each offers the reader insight into the rather quiet life of Bennett's narrator. Instead of telling straightforward stories, she wanders in a stream of consciousness manner from one ordeal to the next: lamenting the broken knobs on her kitchen's mini-stove leads to an explanation of a novel about the last woman on Earth; deliberating over the best breakfast meals digresses into a story about gardening. The reader lives in the narrator's head, learning tangentially through her words about her failed attempt at a doctorate, her romantic life, and her unwavering fear of strangers. Yet, despite these revelations, the empty spaces of the narrator's life, left for the reader to fill in, are what make the book captivating. Never do we glean her name, or occupation, or appearance. She is a physical blank slate, there for the reader's imagination to round out. Bennett has achieved something strange, unique, and undeniably wonderful.

    • AudioFile Magazine
      This unconventional audiobook challenges the listener to be open, inquisitive, and patient. While Lucy Rayner's narration is lovely in its oddly engaging detachment, the novel itself lacks a traditional linear plot. Instead, one must be content to immerse oneself in a series of loosely connected stories about an unnamed narrator whose untethered thoughts meander from observations to inspirations to regrets. Rayner's performance creates a solitary personality: a sometimes accessible and likable narrator and sometimes inscrutable and unknowable one. Adding more of a pause between the stories would aid the listener; as is, the brisk delivery adds to the stream-of-consciousness flow. Rayner's adept vocal performance and Bennett's intriguing prose make for an interesting listen for dedicated listeners. L.B.F. © AudioFile 2016, Portland, Maine

Formats

  • OverDrive Listen audiobook

subjects

Languages

  • English

Levels

  • Lexile® Measure:1360
  • Text Difficulty:11-12

Loading
Check out what's being checked out right now OverDrive service is made possible by the OCLN Member Libraries and the Massachusetts Board of Library Commissioners with funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services and the Commonwealth of Massachusetts.