Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Pond
    Pond
    Pond
    Audiobook4 hours

    Pond

    Written by Claire-Louise Bennett

    Narrated by Lucy Rayner

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    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.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateAug 2, 2016
    ISBN9781515979920
    Pond
    Author

    Claire-Louise Bennett

    Claire-Louise Bennett is the author of Pond, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions. She was born in Wiltshire and currently resides in the west of Ireland.

    Related to Pond

    Related audiobooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Interlude

      Mar 28, 2022

      Interlude
      10 min read

    • Article

      The Prophet of Nothingness

      Sep 12, 2021

      The Prophet of Nothingness
      9 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Lauren Oyler

      Dec 16, 2020

      As I was waiting in line to buy The Complete Gary Lutz it was discovered that some of the books for sale were partially printed upside down. They wouldn’t sell me one of the messed-up books, though I wanted one and said, “No, no, it’s fine, I want on

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Year in Reading: Natalie Bakopoulos

      Dec 8, 2020

      I felt so wrecked, so torn apart—yet somehow, miraculously, also shored back up. The post A Year in Reading: Natalie Bakopoulos appeared first on The Millions.

      13 min read

    • Article

      Tales From Titchmarsh

      Sep 22, 2022

      Tales From Titchmarsh
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Site For Sore Legs

      Sep 29, 2023

      A Site For Sore Legs
      2 min read

    • Article

      Avos In The Dark

      May 27, 2022

      Avos In The Dark
      1 min read

    • Article

      Three Poems

      Jul 1, 2023

      Jester-necked pile of ideasfattening by the cutting board.I have known the summer wall,it says slowly. The hillside facessouth into the valley.Dew on the tomato plants.Anything that grows, swarms,bunches itself against a stayand cannot stay. The vine

      4 min read

    • Article

      Focus On Crocus

      Oct 20, 2021

      Focus On Crocus
      2 min read

    • Article

      Home

      Dec 27, 2018

      Home
      3 min read

    • Article

      Tales from Titchmarsh

      Oct 21, 2021

      Tales from Titchmarsh
      3 min read

    • Article

      I'm With Her… AND YOU?

      Sep 1, 2023

      I'm With Her… AND YOU?
      3 min read

    • Article

      The Eternal Adventure

      Jun 29, 2021

      The Eternal Adventure
      4 min read

    • Article

      Inspiration: telling Stories

      Oct 3, 2021

      Inspiration: telling Stories
      2 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Mar 1, 2022

      Early such darkness, these oncoming nights& sure, I’m dull & even slow to concedehow mornings make equal, swerving measuresthere between those foremost shadowsalong the fence, amid the chickens & nerve,sheep & their indifference to any pair of foolsh

      3 min read

    • Article

      Four Poems

      Jan 1, 2021

      I learned the world through the bottoms of my feet, barein the creeks of summer, stepping on pebbles, the squidgeof moss between my toes. On hot asphalt, the hop and skipover cracks, feet already toughened by bramble, dirt, the pricklyground of pine

      4 min read

    • Article

      Summer Diary

      Jun 3, 2021

      Every day we are exploring more of the forest park across the road from us, relishing it in small sections, getting to know it like a friend. We have found secret paths among the jays and rooks. We have climbed banks of leaf litter, strayed far off p

      7 min read

    • Article

      The Maldives: A taste of Eden

      Jun 29, 2023

      The Maldives: A taste of Eden
      9 min read

    • Article

      Escape To Reality

      Feb 15, 2023

      Escape To Reality
      3 min read

    • Article

      Table Talk

      Mar 1, 2018

      Table Talk
      10 min read

    • Article

      MINT To Be

      Dec 7, 2020

      MINT To Be
      3 min read

    • Article

      John Ashbery

      Mar 15, 2019

      He could understand the things at home.—Wallace Stevens, “Things of August” Scribbled on the expansive mist, the desireof many dwindles to usand our “activities,” wholesomeor otherwise. Soon it becomes apparentthat neither they nor I have any prise o

      4 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for Pond

    3.5/5

    130 ratings13 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      Bennet is precise in her deconstruction and reconstruction of familiar pre-covid rituals. That’s to say, the isolating freedoms of 2015 globalization that seemed to prime us all for lockdowns and social-distance were already completely evident and part of life before the disasters of 2020. Bennett’s sparse novel recreates common experience in a weirdly distancing observational manner. Although she does leave space within the text for reconstituting powers L O V E to swoop down an surprise us all.
    • 3/5
      This is not a book to rush through. It demands patience and contemplation. The language is snappy, vivid, and compelling. It's also meandering and mysterious.
    • 4/5
      This is the oddest book I have ever read. It makes no sense at all. The really odd thing though, is that I enjoyed very much reading it most of the time, although I frequently heard myself muttering, "What the fuck is she talking about? Is that what she was talking about a minute ago?" But there is no narrative, just disjointed pieces of someone's life as though a schizophrenic who smoked a lot of pot was trying to write an autobiography.

      I recieved this ARC free from the publisher theough Goodreads.

    • 5/5
      Prior reviewers in this train have called out essential qualities of the exquisitely self-aware narrator (using descriptors such as fey, quirky and off-kilter), and the Joycean stream of consciousness that informs her narration, wrought in lapidary Nabokovian prose. I'll merely add that the sequence of loosely connected sections forming the bulk of the book, narrated by a young adult woman of indeterminate age in possession of hyperacute sensibilities that charge even the quotidian with meaning and interest, are bookended at front and rear by two chapters unlike any of the others, both of which feature a young girl. In the first chapter, "Voyage in the Dark," a girl, a child, falls to sleep in a garden. In the last, a young girl closes the earth over "papers" before returning home to wash her hands. An apple figures prominently in this prelapsarian garden where, in the last sentence, we learn that morning has arrived. Morning is apostrophized as an entity, and brings with it a "blank card" with which it cleans its nails. With the arrival of Morning's "blank" card, we are told that the young girl realizes her imaginings must now become "more cautious." It is time for the young girl to "go indoors" and wash her hands. That is to say, awaken, and cleanse her hands of the night's chaos, represented by the earth's soil. In between these two flanking chapters, featuring, respectively, a young girl going to sleep and, presumably the same girl forced to temper her imagination by Morning, we are presented with the oneiric, alternately brilliant and disorganized ramblings and obsessions of an adult woman of unclear age, living a largely solitary life in the countryside. In some cases, much symbolism can be read into the stories (e.g., loss of a "control" knob on a stove), but, at other times, the woman lapses into completely opaque ravings. Free-association dominates. As if she is dreaming. And, I suspect, she is, or is, at least, at the hub of a dream. That is to say, the young girl we meet in the first and final chapters appears to be the author of the woman's experience, the "savage swarming magic" of which (to borrow a phrase from earlier in the book) is buried in the final chapter when Morning arrives and the girl covers the "paper" (the recounting of the young woman's phantasmagoric experience) with earth. In fact, tellingly, the young woman discovers, toward the latter part of the dreamlike sequence that constitutes the meat of the novel, that she is underground. She appears to have been put there by the precocious young girl from whose mind she emerged and into which she must withdraw at the break of day. The innocence and madness of the child's dream must end.This reading may be completely off-base, especially since the level of sophistication and subtlety of the observations made by the young woman would seem to be far beyond the ken of any child, unless she happened to be a genius with extensive worldly knowledge. But, if your are a post-structuralist, then I suppose this might be the case and my reading has at least some validity. David Sahner
    • 4/5
      What exactly are the twenty titled sections of Pond? Not exactly stories, most of them. Only very loosely could they be considered meditations. They aren’t essays, though they seem to carry motifs and themes across their surface. And even though characters are scarce, the unnamed narrator becomes intimately characterized. It’s a bit like facets of a well-cut gem, each refraction bending the light, distorting any hoped-for view of the whole. Yet beautiful, all the same.In the absence of narrative drive, reactive characters, and a strong sense of place, inevitably the reader is forced back upon the sentences that Bennett deploys. Indeed you may find yourself reading her sentences multiple times in order to catch the rhythm she is using, to luxuriate in her startling word choices. Even a flight of joycean exuberance seems to just naturally fit in when it arrives. And throughout this highly self-conscious wordplay, there is particularity. Plain-wrapper, banal, particularity: about oven knobs, dirt and weeds, a sign warning(?) or declaring(?) — Pond!But does it work? Honestly, I don’t know. While thoroughly enjoying, even delighting, in the reading of the book, I find very shortly thereafter that I can’t recall much of anything in it, other than a vague impression and a certain reverence for language and astonishment at what can be accomplished with it. I suspect that means I need to read it again, which is something to look forward to very much.Recommended.
    • 4/5
      DEFINITELY not my usual thing, but "Pond" may have single-handedly broken me out of my wishy-washy reading slump. Think a much more more digestible Proust or Knausgård. Surprisingly funny, a little dark at times, and completely charming. I'm not sure what it was about the narrator's suggestions for serving porridge, or her dissection of what it means to sit on the ottoman in her living room, but I couldn't put this down.
    • 4/5
      An intriguing and poetic collection, that sits somewhere between short stories and stream of consciousness. There is a loose narrative thread, in that all of the stories describe the thoughts of a woman living alone in a rented cottage on the west coast of Ireland. The pieces vary in length from a few lines to 20 pages. Bennett has a talent for making poetic observations about some very quotidian subject matter, and creating a slightly unsettling atmosphere. I am struggling to describe why this works, but I would certainly recommend it.
    • 5/5
      Both Karl Ove Knausgaard and Nicole Krauss mentioned this in their recent New Yorker interviews which was enough of a rec for me, so I ordered it and it came in this minimalist edition from Fitzcarraldo. At first I thought the narrator of this loose collection of short and flash fictions must be a little unhinged. The stories are beautifully and deliberately composed, but decidedly off-kilter. Then they began to wash over me and I felt less like the narrator was bonkers and more like she had tapped into the bonkers, self-deluding and obsessive nature of every lonely and insecure person ever, including this humbled reader.

      I don't know if I have ever read something so peculiar that sneakily but steadily evolved into something so familiar and even personal.
    • 4/5
      The debut volume of fiction by Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond, is a peculiar and unsettling little volume, narrated in exquisitely wrought prose by an unnamed young woman living in solitude on the west coast of Ireland. With its ambiguous structure (linked stories? novel?) and naval-gazing focus on the minutiae of the narrator’s life, her febrile observations and the zany trajectory of her restless mind, the book poses real challenges to notions of what fiction is supposed to be and do. Bennett has fashioned a narrative that is, at one and the same time, artful and naïve, confessional and closely guarded. We know little about the narrator, and other than the cottage she’s rented—which has a bit of a history—and some of the surrounding landscape, she seems to be living a life stripped of emotion and denuded of personal context. Lovers are mentioned in passing. Drinking. Bicycling. Food, occasionally. She has a landlady. What occupies her to a much greater extent than any informative details pertaining to herself are tiny, seemingly unimportant things and actions, which in her mind are endowed with great significance and have the power to affect her moods and capture her attention for hours or even days at a time. Sitting in a neighbour’s kitchen for no reason that she can recall, the control knobs on her cooking unit, the question of who will sit on the ottoman when she throws a party, a sign that someone has erected next to the pond that says “Pond,” fountain pens: these are a few of the things that she analyzes at length and over which she obsesses. The twenty sections of the book—some of which are fragmentary; others run for 20 pages or more—are adamantly not constructed as sequences of events or rendered in dramatic fashion. There is no plot; one could even argue there is no action. Rather, what we confront in the pages of this book is a mind in ceaseless motion: always observing, considering, reflecting. But then, paradoxically, with her meandering sentences, deft comic timing and bracing non sequiturs, Bennett generates great suspense. Once you get into it, Pond captivates and becomes a page turner: where will the narrator’s mind go next? Making that discovery is endlessly fascinating.
    • 3/5
      An interesting take on a journal this slim book has interconnecting stories as told by a woman living in a small town in Ireland. I’m one of the reviewers who found the stories flat. The concept was interesting but the stories failed to hold my attention.
    • 3/5
      I cannot warm to stream of consciousness writing. This woman's solitary murmurings are intimate and sometimes funny, but not my cup of tea. It almost reminds me of eavesdropping on someone who is not all there. I thank the author and the Penguin First to Read program for a complimentary copy.
    • 4/5
      This is a unique book basically consisting of a series of meditations by a woman who is living a fairly solitary life. She’s mostly alone but does have contact with some friends and even throws a party. Her musings are sometimes humorous and sometimes sad. Some of the chapters are very short, only a few sentences as she not only describes her days but thinks back on her past.For those of you looking for a good plot, this wouldn’t be the book for you. To give you an idea, the first chapter is about what’s best to eat for breakfast and how to arrange fruit in a bowl to give a pleasing appearance. What I admired about the book is the author’s very intimate portrayal of this woman and her daily life. It’s pure poetry and I felt such a connection to this character. Her solitary life has slowed her down to the point where she can appreciate the little things in life instead of, as most of the rest of us, rushing around missing so much. Yet there was a sadness and loneliness in her that was very touching. There were a couple of chapters that seemed to be no more than incoherent ramblings or else I just didn’t understand what she was thinking. But all in all, I enjoyed this slow-moving, thoughtful book. The book slowed me down, too, as I savored every word. The author has treated her readers to an insight into this woman’s mind and heart and has painted an artistic portrait of a solitary woman in words alone.This book was given to me by the publisher through First to Read in return for an honest review.
    • 2/5
      What an odd little book! Pond by Claire-Louise Bennet is a series of musings by an unnamed woman, living in a cottage by a pond that can hardly be called a pond; she seems to come to realizations about herself by “living” inside her head. It’s about a letter in a clutch bag and an ottoman at a party. Little things like breakfast (bananas and oatmeal, oatmeal, a banana), a sign that reads “Pond,” or the fact that her cottage was built/”pulled” from the side of the hill take on enormous import when seen through her eyes. She sleeps with men only when she’s inebriated and they are “some of the oddest males the species has to offer.” I had a love-hate relationship with this book. It took me almost 100 pages before I really thought I liked it. That lasted for about 50 pages. Perhaps I just wasn’t prepared for what I was in for. It certainly is interesting and at times, almost poetic. Then again, perhaps I just didn’t get it.