Who lived in a shack but likely didn’t have to do his laundry, as Rebecca Kathryn Schulz hilariously detailed last year in her ponderance on Thoreau,īitingly titled, “Pond Scum” -nor is it about the same privileged man Throwing out the creature comforts of society for a brief and beautiful proto-hippy The title and some of the narrator’s observationsĭeliberately reach back to that other famous literary pond, Bennett’s Pond is an altogether different body of water from Henry David Unknowable, to find real gems of observation and language. In prose that is alternatively deliberate and crisp, surrealistic and Through this glistening mud that Bennett’s readers get to mudlark, mucking about Is not typically a positive description for a narrative, but this mud is sparkling,įull of mica and minerals that glitter with color when the sun’s rays hit. There, and how she manages to get by are not proffered to the reader. Path is murky and unclear answers to who she is, where she is, why she is TheseĪre the minutiae the narrator shares, it’s the mud she wades through, and her She composts, she gardens, she ruminates on how to fix theīroken nobs on her hob and obsesses about how to properly sweep leaves. She has set herself as apart as much as she can from theīusy, commercial world. Narrator, a nameless woman, a recluse who finds herself most at ease in the The rented cottage is seemingly occupied by the same Unlike Woolf’s closed up summer house, Pond’s POND, by Claire-Louise Bennett Riverhead, pp.
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