Pond, ear-lobe

I first encountered Fitzcarraldo Editions in the summer of 2017, while browsing in the London Review Bookshop, near the British Museum. I came across a slim paperback volume with a plain cover in International Klein Blue. In white lettering was a single-word title, “Pond,” and the name of the author, Claire-Louise Bennett, along with the name of the publisher and its insignia (a bell inscribed in a circle).

A tuthree weeks ago, my Massachusetts correspondent P sent me a clipping from the NewYorker about this Art House publisher. Fitzcarraldo has a track record for discovering future Nobel Prize for Literature winners. As all these literateurs are being fulsome in their praise and support of an Irish writer, I went to the library catalogue to see what was in stock. Synchronicity revealed that Wexford Town library had a copy of Pond and I was due to attend Wexford Science Café exactly a week later. Instead of making an on-line reservation - and allowing the algorithm to send a copy from Sligo <whoop whoop carbon footprint alert> - I e-mailed The Librarian at Wexford and asked them to bring their copy down from the top floor and hold it for me. And in due course I took delivery of Pond just before attending a discussion about the history of forensic science in Ireland.

Pond was first published (2015) by Stinging Fly Press in Dublin before being spotted and boosted by Fitzcarraldo. And 'my' copy is such a 1st Edition. Let's say first off that's it's not as easy reading as Louis L'Amour. There is no Introduction so the reader must surmise that these are 20 short-to-microscopic pieces of literary fiction memoir, reflecting on what it is like being a slightly unhinged single woman living in the West of Ireland in the early 21stC. She has an uneasy relationship with the earth and what can be grown in it; and she details the uneasy relationships she has with her feller, her friends, a pair of thatchers and her landlady (and the landlady's baleful omnipresent sister). The details are, I guess, the point; or at least the reason why The Literary Scene has taken Bennett up so enthusiastically. 

That and the quirky, arresting, turns of phrase: "rice hissing out of the sack like rain" reminding me of my favorite lines in Seamus Heaney " But I ran my hand in the half-filled bags / Hooked to the slots. It was hard as shot, / Innumerable and cool"  . . . and the $10 words: antithetical, cantilevered, costive, ensorcelled, minacious, prelapsarian, scintillant, serrulated. In one essay she talks about the baggage the reader carries when real people share a name with a character in the tale . . . some little thing about Miriam in real life will infiltrate Miriam in the book so it doesn't matter how many times her ear lobes are referred to as dainty and girlish; in the reader's mind Miriam's ear lobes are forever florid and pendulous. This wasn't the only time I laughed out loud.

But, dammit, if you're going to be elliptical and allusive about a pond, why take 17 pages about it when 17 syllables will do?

古池や furu ike ya

蛙飛こむ kawazu tobikomu
水のおと mizu no oto

An ancient pond / a frog jumps in / ploosh! Basho [more / prev]