Pond - Couverture souple

Bennett, Claire-Louise

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 0399575901 ISBN 13 : 9780399575907

Editeur : Penguin Publishing Group, 2017

A propos du livre

Extrait :

Morning, Noon & Night

Sometimes a banana with coffee is nice. It ought not to be too ripe-in fact there should be a definite remainder of green along the stalk, and if there isn't, forget about it. Though admittedly that is easier said than done. Apples can be forgotten about, but not bananas, not really. They don't in fact take at all well to being forgotten about. They wizen and stink of putrid and go almost black.

Oatcakes along with it can be nice, the rough sort. The rough sort of oatcake goes especially well with a banana by the way-by the way, the banana might be chilled slightly. This can occur in the fridge overnight of course, depending on how prescient and steadfast one is about one's morning victuals, or, it might be, and this in fact is much more preferable, there's a nice cool windowsill where a bowl especially for fruit can always be placed.

A splendid deep wide sill with no wooden overlay, just the plastered stone, nice and chilly: the perfect place for a bowl. Even a few actually, a few bowls in fact. The sill's that big it can accommodate three sizeable bowls very well without appearing the least bit encumbered. It's quite pleasant, then, to unpack the pannier bags and arrange everything intently in the bowls upon the sill. Aubergine, squash, asparagus and small vine tomatoes look terribly swish together and it's no surprise at all that anyone would experience a sudden urge at any time during the day to sit down at once and attempt with a palette and brush to convey the exotic patina of such an irrepressible gathering of illustrious vegetables, there on the nice cool windowsill.

Pears don't mix well. Pears should always be small and organised nose to tail in a bowl of their very own and perhaps very occasionally introduced to a stem of the freshest red currants, which ought not to be hoisted like a mantle across the freckled belly of the topmost pear, but strewn a little further down so that some of the scarlet berries loll and bask between the slowly shifting gaps.

Bananas and oatcakes are by the way a very satisfactory substitute for those mornings when the time for porridge has quite suddenly passed. If a neighbour has been overheard or the towels folded the day's too far in and porridge, at this point, will feel vertical and oppressive, like a gloomy repast from the underworld. As such, in all likelihood, a submerged stump of resentment will begin to perk up right at the first mouthful and will very likely preside dumbly over the entire day. Until, finally, at around four o'clock, it becomes unfairly but inevitably linked to someone close by, to a particular facet of their behaviour in fact, a perpetually irksome facet that can be readily isolated and enlarged and thereupon pinpointed as the prime cause of this most foreboding sense of resentment, which has been on the rise, inexplicably, all day, since that first mouthful of porridge.

Some sort of black jam in the middle of porridge is very nice, very striking in fact. And then a few flaked almonds. Be careful though, be very careful with flaked almonds; they are not at all suitable for morose or fainthearted types and shouldn't be flung about like confetti because almonds are not in the least like confetti. On the contrary, flaked almonds ought not to touch one another and should be organised in simple patterns, as on the side of a pavlova, and then they are quite pretty and perfectly innocuous. But shake out a palmful of flaked almonds and you'll see they closely resemble fingernails that have come away from a hand which has just seen the light of day.

Black jam and blanched fingernails, slowly sinking into the oozing burgoo! Lately, in the mornings, Ravel, played several times over, has been a very nice accompaniment indeed. And this, for now, is how, with minor variations, the day begins.

My own nails are doing very well as a matter of fact, indeed, I'm not sure they have ever done better. If you must know I painted them in the kitchen last Wednesday after lunch, and the shade I painted them right there in the kitchen is called Highland Mist. Which is a very good name, a very apt name, as it turns out. Because, you see, the natural colour of my nail, both the white part and the pink part, is still just about visible beneath the polish, it hasn't been completely obscured. And as time passes the polish doesn't chip away as such, it just sort of thins out around the edges, so now, as well as being able to see the white part and the pink part, the soot beneath the tips is also clearly visible. There, through the mist, which is of course the colour of heather, I can see coal dust beneath my fingernails. When the nails aren't painted at all this dirt has no other effect besides looking grubby and unkempt, but under the thinning sheen of Highland Mist something further occurs to me when I consider my hands. They look like the hands of someone very charming and refined who has had to dig themselves up out of some dank and wretched spot they really shouldn't have fallen into. And that amuses me, that really amuses me.

Indeed, it wouldn't be entirely unwarranted to suggest that I might, overall, have the appearance and occasionally emanate the demeanour of someone who grows things. That's to say, I might, from time to time, be considered earthy in its most narrow application. However, truth is, I have propagated very little and possess only a polite curiosity for horticultural endeavours. It's quite true that bright green parsley grows out of a pot near my door but I did not grow it from seed, not at all-I simply bought it already sprouted from a nearby supermarket, turned the plant out its plastic carton and shoved its compacted network of roots and soil here, into the pot next to my door.

Prior to that, some years ago, when I lived near the canal, I could plainly see from my bedroom window a most idyllic piece of land, encircled by the gardens of houses in back-to-back streets which thereby rendered it landlocked and enticing. It seemed impossible to get to the garden yet when I tore after a cat early one day he led me directly to it, whereupon he skedaddled sharpish and left me a tortured wren to cradle and fold. The wren had sung above my head for many weeks in the sunshine while I wrote letters in the morning and so it was only natural for me to cry out when I found it maimed and silent on the moss beneath the privet hedge. I was so upset I wanted to take that cat to a hot pan and sear its foul backside in an explosion of oil. I'll make you hiss you little shit. Never mind. I was in the garden that nobody owned or imposed upon and now that I had come here once I could come here again, surely. That's how it worked when I was a child anyhow, and I don't suppose these matters change a great deal.

I made sly enquiries just as a child does but unfortunately in contrast to a child I was listened to rather too attentively and so I quickly devised a wholesome reason for wishing to know who owned the land and whether I might visit it from time to time. It would be a very excellent place to grow things I'm sure I said and despite having never demonstrated any enthusiasm for gardening before and despite my statement of interest being really rather vague my proposition was taken seriously and since it turned out the land was in fact owned by the Catholic Church I was directed to the large house on the corner where the parish priest himself resided. This development was not something I had foreseen, truth be told I'd had no purposeful intentions. I think I just fancied the idea of having a secluded place to stand about in now and then, a secret garden if you like. And I should never have said a word about it because as usual the minute I did it all became quite misshapen and not what I had in mind at all, and yet there was something so alien and absurd about how it was all progressing that I couldn't help but go right along with it.

He was pleasantly perfunctory and did not mention anything at all about God, though he did enunciate the word bounty rather pointedly, but I didn't flinch. Where do you live, he said. Over in that house there, I said, and pointed through the window at a house across the road. He didn't look in the direction of my finger, it was quite sufficient for him that I could stand where I was and at the same time point to my house, and so it was settled. I do not remember the interior of the priest's house. I think the wallpaper in the hallway might have been sage green. It could be the case that I went in no further than the hallway. Perhaps I just stood at the door on the street looking in at the hallway. And then down at the plastic step. Yes, I believe he was wearing trainers in fact.

Clearing a decent area of ground and making it ready for planting potatoes was hard and monotonous work added to which early spring tends to be rather humid here and indeed it was so that particular year. I do not know fully what drove me to deracinate thick and fuzzy weeds like that every day in the premature heat. I often stopped and stood quite still, wondering what hopes my mind had just then been taken up with, but I could seldom recall. However, in spite of my own bemusement, for the first time in my adult life other people knew exactly what I was doing. It was as plain as day to them. I'd come back with the tools and lean them against the house wall and go inside to wash my hands and it would be quite clear to anyone who saw me what I had been doing that day. I believe during that period people were, notwithstanding two or three specific incidents, conspicuously more agreeable towards me.

As with most mensurable areas of life I demonstrated no ambition whatsoever as a grower and selected to cultivate low-maintenance crops only. Potatoes, spinach and broad beans. That was it. That was enough. People told me what a cinch it was to grow courgettes, squash, marrow, carrots, but nothing had changed really-I hadn't suddenly become a gardener, and I resented being spoken to as though I had. The plants were coming on quite nicely when I received an invitation to speak at a very eminent university across the water upon a subject I was very interested in indeed-though not necessarily in a meritorious way. That's to say my interest was far too personal and not strictly academic and so my methodology came across as nostalgic and my perspective rather naive since I ignored the usual critical frameworks which were anyhow quite incomprehensible to me and instead pilfered haphazardly from the entire history of Western literature in order to strengthen my argument, which I cannot now recall. It had something to do with love. About the essential brutality of love. About those adventitious souls who deliberately seek out love as a prime agent of total self-immolation. Yes, that's right. It attempted to show that in the whole history of literature love is quite routinely depicted as an engulfing process of ecstatic suffering which finally, mercifully, obliterates us and delivers us to oblivion. Dismembered and packed off. Something like that. Something along those lines. I am mad about you. I am going out of my mind. My soul burns for you. I am inflamed. There is nothing now, nothing except you. Gone, quite gone. That kind of thing. I don't think it went down very well.

In fact I think it was considered rather unsophisticated and I remember feeling, despite my new floral chemise, suddenly sullen and practically gothic. Actually, now that I come to think of it, I think the gist of my argument was simply that love is indeed a vicious and divine disintegration of selfhood and that artistic representations of it as such aren't at all uncommon or outlandish and have nothing whatsoever to do with endeavouring to shock an audience. There was an awful lot of violence you see in the work of the playwright the conference was reputedly reassessing and by and large that violence had hitherto been widely interpreted as nothing more than a dramatic strategy designed to shock, which I could never quite accept because how on earth is there anything shocking about violence? Anyway, I must confess, in order to establish a perennial language of love that testified to the abominable emancipation that is brought on by want of another I did in fact reference not only Sappho, Seneca, Novalis, Roland Barthes, Denis de Rougement and Dutch historian Johan Huizinga, I also included lyrics by PJ Harvey and Nick Cave, with the somewhat misplaced intention of demonstrating that it just never stops. That the desire to come apart irrevocably will always be as strong as, if not stronger than, the drive to establish oneself. As deep as ink and black, black as the deepest sea.

Afterwards, when people were milling about and nodding in little groups, and I wasn't sure which of the several exits to make immediate use of, one of the academic big guns approached me and commented upon my paper. This all happened several years ago by the way-and I'm not absolutely sure why I'm recounting it here since it hardly situates me in a very flattering light-anyway, I don't recall exactly what he said to me, but it was exceedingly condescending and I very very clearly remember thinking why don't you fall over. Why don't you become tangled in some cables near the screen at the front on your way out and fall over and why don't you smack your head off a very sharp corner of the desk where earlier I sat and delivered my oh so charming missive and cut your head open ever so slightly so that a little bit of blood drops out. Just a little trickle of blood so that you don't look injured, only stupid and a bit iffy. Thank you very much, I said. And suddenly my back went cold so I deduced that the outside must after all be right there behind me; I turned around and walked towards it and very soon the ground did in fact change. It was wet and the car park was almost empty and smelt exclusively of dishcloths.

Revue de presse :

"[An] auspicious debut ... Bennett seems to know exactly what to take seriously. She puts us inside a complicated, teeming mind, and she doesn’t dabble in forced epiphanies... Sometimes first novels like Pond are one-offs. They deliver a voice the author can’t tap again. Ms. Bennett’s sensibility here feels like the tip of a deep iceberg, and I’ll be in line to read whatever she publishes next. Her witty misanthropy is here to ward off mental scurvy." –The New York Times

"Imagine a short-story collection written by Emily Dickinson, and you’ll get the weird genius of this book.” –The Boston Globe
 
“A sharp, funny, and eccentric debut ... one of those books so odd and vivid they make your own life feel strangely remote. Somehow, Bennett has written a fantasy novel for grownups that is a kind of extended case for living an existence that threatens to slip out of tune...Pond makes the case for Bennett as an innovative writer of real talent. ... [It]reminds us that small things have great depths.” –The New York Times Book Review

“A work of fiction that will make you feel pleasantly insane...Like Lydia Davis, Bennett...takes a state of mind closely associated with madness and places it in settings that are utterly domestic, mundane. The result is fervid and fearful...It is also funny...unnerving... sensitive to the point of being porous...lucid, practical, and excruciatingly cognizant of what is normal.” –The New Yorker

“Dazzling...[an] exquisitely written and daring debut work of fiction...Pond’s lovely strangeness lies in just how intimate we feel with our heroine despite knowing so little about her. By eschewing exposition, Bennett’s novel demonstrates the elucidating power of simply recording a consciousness at work, a state of being – a “mind in motion.” –O, the Oprah Magazine

“The sort of avant-garde opus destined to put its author on the map alongside modern-day prose stylists of the highest order...The tilt of Bennett’s pen (or the stroke of her key) lends gravity to anything it touches... This collection is for wiseasses and weirdos, a cathedral of strange sentences... built upon the singular experience of being a human being. It contains only sharp observations and a constant juggling between beauty and decay, moments stretched and skewed like leaded glass...Pond sparkles with witty one-liners...[a] gorgeous book.” –Los Angeles Review of Books 

"[T]his Woolfian novella will challenge all your ideas of narrative. Dreamlike fragments of a life drift in and out of frame, with startling prose that will make your usual perspective feel like sleepwalking." –Elle

“Bennett’s prose—ardent, addictively obsessive-compulsive, a little feral—is from another galaxy, or maybe another century. Her delight in nature and gardening can be kookily romantic...and yet one could also imagine her taking an improbably cheerful seat among the modernists...A man alone is a visionary; a woman alone is a witch—or worse, Bridget Jones. But Bennett spins something entirely different from her separateness, a kind of philosophy of being in the world as a writer both refreshing and hard-won." –Vogue

“Innovative, beguiling...meditative...a fresh new voice from seemingly out of nowhere...Reading Bennett’s book of loosely linked stories is a lovely retreat from the cacophony of contemporary life...wryly intelligent...quirky...[and] brightly original.” –Los Angeles Times

“[A] smart, funny, elliptical debut...Reminiscent of Joyce and Beckett in its unmistakably Irish blend of earthy wit and existential unease. Yet Bennett does much more than emulate literary forebears. Pond expressed her unique sensibility in deceptively simply, delightfully unsettled prose. We’ll be hearing more from this formidably gifted young writer.” –The Boston Globe

"[Pond] contains no story, no action and...one describable character and is defined as much by these absences as by the material that remains. What’s left on the page are the gleanings of a “mind in motion,” to borrow Ms. Bennett’s phrase—reflections on everyday objects, philosophical digressions, daydreams and stirred-up memories and associations... The book is reminiscent of a country diary, with entries that dwell on the narrator’s breakfast routine or her vegetable garden...Hers is a mind in attentive communion with itself, building baroque and beautiful cloud castles of thought to distract from the storms of the real." –Wall Street Journal

“An elegant and intoxicating debut novel...rich with strange, sensuous and exhilarating moods and textures...we are captivated by the narrator’s sharply illuminated interior reality and her lyrical depictions of the nature about her. Boldly defying convention, Pond is an exceptional debut with beautiful hidden depths.” –Minneapolis Star-Tribune

“A fascinating and utterly immersive reading experience that speaks volumes about the author’s creative process and delivers insights in droves...compulsively readable and wacky...[Bennett has] diffused our often confusing and chaotic world into something more manageable, yet all the while making itty-bitty molehills into mountains.” –San Francisco Chronicle

“[A] cool, curious dive into a world of minutiae... intense, and often wickedly funny.” –Christian Science Monitor

“Immediately, the prose in Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond feels new but deeply familiar — like the voice in your head but dialed just to the left. You are dropped into the book without your wits about you, and you may not totally recover them. It’s exhilarating......[Her] solitude offers the mental freedom to digress and to proclaim and to spend pages on beautifully ludicrous digressions. Within these digressions are details, and idiosyncratic, almost-confessional meditations on those details that would put Knausgaard to shame. This is a woman at her most comfortable, her most confident...I think someone should award [Bennett] a great prize so that she can write us all something new.” –NYMag's The Cut

“Muddiness is not typically a positive description for a narrative, but this mud is sparkling, full of mica and minerals that glitter with color when the sun’s rays hit. It’s through this glistening mud that Bennett’s readers get to mudlark, mucking about in prose that is alternatively deliberate and crisp, surrealistic and unknowable, to find real gems of observation and language... deeply satisfying and refreshing...Bennett stomps all over writing-dude-in-nature territory without having to set a foot off her main character’s property line.” –New Republic

"Sharp and witty...wonderfully discursive...Pond is maybe best understood as an embrace of all that wriggles in the dirt, and an experiment in uncovering that engrossing underworld beneath our more refined and constructed selves through the act of writing. Bennett...writes through the dramatic into something deeper, and the result is a reverie of ‘fervid primary visions,’ the dredging of a riverine mind.” –The Millions

"A phenomenal combination of hilarity and stillness with a weird undercurrent of menace that never quite rises to the surface but always leaves you slightly uneasy even as you are smiling about something brilliant the writer has managed to capture in the short space of a few pages.” –The Awl

“Impressive indeed.” –Vol 1 Brooklyn

“Reminiscent of Norwegian writer Karl Knausgård as much as it is Thoreau and Zadie Smith.” –Refinery29

"Compelling [and] innovative ...Bennett’s unique portrait of a persona emerges with an intensity and vision not often seen, or felt, in a debut.” –Poets & Writers

“Pond, in its quirky structure and language, calls to mind the Irish fathers of literary modernism Joyce and Beckett. But then it also echoes Woolf's Mrs. Dalloway, Carroll's Alice, Thoreau's Walden and, more contemporarily, Strout's Olive Kitteridge, as well as anything by Nicholson Baker...Bennett's narrator is a funny, self-deprecating, observant, opinionated, earthy woman whose mind grasps every detailed string of her rural life and gives it a pull to reveal her curiosity and contented solitude...What a treasure, this woman!” –Shelf Awareness

“Beautiful and brief.” –Brooklyn Magazine

“Ireland is never mentioned outright in Claire-Louise Bennett's debut, but it is undeniably there ... even if just in the extraordinary language constructing every sentence... With a rich Irish literary tradition marked by behemoths like W.B. Yeats and James Joyce, there are many books one can pick up to prepare for a trip to Ireland. However, Bennett represents the modern writer who is left to carry on such a mantel; she will not disappoint.” –The Week, “What to Read Based on Where You’re Traveling this Summer” 

“[Pond is] packed with vivid imagery of a quiet life, and deep reflections from an unquiet mind. It’s excellent, it’s ravishing, it’ll win a ton of awards, it’ll show up on everyone’s Best of 2016 lists......bravely original.” --Fiction Advocate

“A formally inventive work that slips past traditional storytelling to focus on impression as it chronicles the interior life of a single, unnamed woman dwelling on Ireland’s coast.” -Library Journal

"Mysteriously but wryly told...it is unlike anything else; its 20 stories portray the things we take for granted as being important, vital and worthy of us paying much closer attention." –National Post

"Innovative and elegant...In her celebration of minutiae, Bennett recreates the experience of a believable, uniquely captivating persona.  Pond deserves to be discovered and dived into, so thoroughly does Bennett submerge readers into her meticulously dazzling world.” –Booklist (starred)

"Captivating...Bennett has achieved something strange, unique, and undeniably wonderful." –Publisher's Weekly (starred)

"What Bennett aims at is nothing short of a re-enchantment of the world. ... This is a truly stunning debut, beautifully written and profoundly witty." –The Guardian
 
“A beautiful, lasting book that privileges modes of human experience that are so often undervalued, if they are acknowledged at all: neither formative encounters nor outward achievement, but rather the workings of a roving, inquisitive mind, open and receptive to all.” –Literary Review (London)
 
“[An] artful collection of shut-in soliloquies...striking.” -The Telegraph, “What to Read in 2015”
 
“Elegantly inventive.” –Financial Times

“A wild, rewardingly ecstatic ride.” –The Globe and Mail

“Elegant and funny and seems to find a whole new space in the form.” –Eimear McBride, TLS, “Books of the Year”

“A touch of William Gaddis.   A touch of Lydia Davis.  A touch of Samuel Beckett.  A touch of Edna O'Brien.  And yet Claire-Louise Bennett's POND feels entirely unique.   Quiet and luxurious all at once, this will be one of the most sensational debuts of the year.” —Colum McCann, author of Let the Great World Spin 

"Claire-Louise Bennett sets the conventions of literary fiction ablaze in this ferociously intelligent and funny debut. Don't be fooled by Pond's small size. It contains multitudes." —Jenny Offill, author of Department of Speculation

"Pond is brilliant — sharp and absorbing, compassionate and funny — and Claire-Louise Bennett is a deeply original writer with talent to spare. I can't stop thinking about this book."
—Molly Antopol, author of The UnAmericans

"As brilliant a debut and as distinct a voice as we've heard in years--this is a real writer with the real goods."--Kevin Barry, author of Beatlebone and City of Bohane

“I’d heard more good whispers about Pond than almost any other debut this year. . . . These stories are intelligent and funny, innovative and provocative, and it’s impossible to read them without thinking that here is a writer who has only just begun to show what she can do.” —Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing

“Extraordinary . . . profoundly original though not eccentric, sharp and tender, funny and deeply engaging. A very new sort of writing . . . an acute, satisfying, delicate, honest meditation on both the joys and frustrations of a life fully lived in solitude. Take it slowly, because it is worth it, and be impressed and joyful.” —Sara Maitland, author of A Book of Silence

“Wielding a wry but implacable logic, Claire-Louise Bennett dives under the surface of ‘ordinary’ experiences and things to reveal their supreme and giddy illogic. Like . . . Lydia Davis . . . she writes an impeccable affectless prose that almost magically arrives at something extraordinary.” —Chris Kraus, author of I Love Dick

“Claire-Louise Bennett is a major writer to be discovered and treasured.” —Deborah Levy, author of Swimming Home

À propos de cette édition

• Éditeur: Penguin Publishing Group
• Date d'édition: 2017
• ISBN 10: 0399575901
• ISBN 13: 9780399575907
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 208