A review by hicklit
Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett

adventurous challenging dark emotional funny hopeful reflective relaxing sad tense slow-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character

4.75

Bennett writes beautifully about the most mundane tasks and aspects of existence of life, but if you have even the most minute issue in your personal life, this book doesn't feel like an escape or refuge, it ends up feeling more like a prison. In some ways I was grateful that the large descriptive language used to describe the components of an oven and the hardships that went into cooking within its decaying vessel or the storm that returned or the late fillers to a conversation once remembered or recalled, but they began to grate on me. I think it added to the madness that comes with voluntary self-isolation. The mind begins to seep under and around the social parameters of most human interaction and delve deeper into the lesser known languages of the live and inanimate objects around you. I think that may be what she's hinting at when she refers to English not being her first language more so than another we know as humans. Ironically, it works and doesn't work on two levels, because of the current times of the covid pandemic and then it almost made me guffaw, with each attempt to descriptively pain pictures of the nothingness that was going on around her, in light of the battles us black and brown people are facing in America's dream of white supremacy. But that all fed into the experience, in current times it is white privilege to be able to moan and groan and go insane over such trivial occurrences, or lack thereof, but in those moments of crisis, panic, and anxiety, on occasion I could feel the placid stillness that comes over nature and eventually over you, if placed under the right circumstances. I am not mad at Bennett, I've wanted to read this book for awhile now, I am mad at my timing though. It was lovely up until the last 50 some off pages. That's when the madness took over and I could feel the pain of a removed existence. Brava if that crawling crescendo was planned to be built in. My mind tends to drift back towards the waves of prose and the feelings it gifted even years later. A pure treasure.