Pond by bennett6/12/2023 ![]() ![]() ![]() This book, I thought, is a pathless wood - an unmarked, looping, roundabout path through the life of a narrator whose name you never discover, but whose complicated inner workings unfold before you so that at the end of the novel you feel calmer, more vulnerable, more real. Under normal circumstances I would have ignored this little snippet from Byron, but I had been grappling for the last week and a half with Bennett’s novel a beautifully precise but sometimes dodgy book that looks you in the face for only seconds at a time before skirting off in some strange, tangential direction, leaving you to make sense of any philosophical or emotional discoveries alone. ![]() This particular tag featured a quote from Lord Byron, which read, simply: “There is pleasure in the pathless woods.” Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett (Riverhead Books, 2016)Ī few weeks ago, while in the middle of Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut novel Pond, I discovered an interesting quote on the paper tag attached to my bag of chamomile tea - a great venue if you’re looking for cheery aphorisms, but rarely a space for particularly thought-provoking material. ![]()
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