![]() ![]() ![]() In “The Big Day,” the protagonist is bothered by a sign her landlady has staked next to the garden pond: “I wouldn’t put a sign next to a pond saying Pond.” Later, in preparation for a celebration, her landlady rents a portable toilet for the property with “a sign stuck upon it saying Toilet.” This humorous turn leads the protagonist to conclude that her first language is not English at all but one “simmering in the elastic gloom betwixt my flickering organs.” Initially relishing the anonymity, the protagonist befriends her landlady and takes on lovers, yet her experiences with a lush backyard garden and her own imagination offer her much more satisfaction than most human interaction.Ī beauty of Pond is that it resists definition, reading as a novel, a novel-in-stories, or a story collection, and therein also lies some of its power and a key theme of the novel: the need to welcome experience on its own terms, without the constraints of human language. 195 pages.Ĭlaire-Louise Bennett’s debut novel, Pond, follows an unnamed young woman who takes up residence in a village on Ireland’s west coast. ![]()
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