Signpost reviews 2015 full#

Signpost reviews 2015 full#

Benign object arrangements, which are usually just ways of setting a scene, unleash the full sensuous force of Bennett’s prose-every detail adds a layer to experience: ‘they are very nice to eat, oranges, when you’ve been having sex for ages.

This is the gaze of wonder ( émerveillement) according to Luce Irigaray, and it’s a useful way of getting to grips with the book.īennett’s narrator is an Olympic all-star in linguistic calisthenics, creating wonder through heightened, gorgeous imagery: grass after the rain looks like a ‘squandered chandelier dashing headlong down the hillside’. Each sentence fissures the ordinary way you look at things, by immersing you in the gaze of a rather eccentric, solitary narrator: objects that are usually taken for granted become alien, to be apprehended again and again, in different ways. Read the first couple of lines and you’re strung along, feverish.

Claire-Louise Bennett’s debut short story collection is extraordinary because of what she manages to do in such a presumably mundane, restricted space, without using any traditional plot devices. The musings and memories of an unnamed woman make up the 20 stories in Pond: a series of interconnected narratives, fixed in time and place (2013, an Irish cottage on the Western coast). Pond b y Claire-Louise Bennett - Alexandra d’Abbadie

The wildness logo, a stylised W that looks like two upside-down mountain peaks.