“It is bliss to just be able to feel that, and so much gets in the way of it. “That capacity to just be absolutely immersed in the world in the present moment is just, well, it’s just bliss, isn’t it?” says Bennett. Her list of influences runs long, from Beckett and Calvino to Gaston Bachelard and Rebecca Solnit (if the act of writing is solitary, literature is by its nature social), but it’s her ability to convey a face-pressed-to-glass suspension, elliptical and floating in time, that invites us in. Growing up in the U.K.’s southwest, not far from Stonehenge, she remembers hiding behind the living room curtains, looking out the window, feeling suspended between indoors and out. Sleepless at night, she thinks yearningly of things like broad bean plants.īennett estimates that she’d been writing for 25 years before Pond, which begins and ends with a young girl’s perspective, and it’s tempting to read the book not only as a rebuttal to the expectations of life and plot, but also as a string of experiments in interior listening, an effort that conjures the vividness and vulnerability of a child’s imagination. Her delight in nature and gardening can be kookily romantic-the grass following a rain shower resembles a “squandered chandelier dashing headlong down the hillside,” and yet one could also imagine her taking an improbably cheerful seat among the modernists. But Bennett’s prose-ardent, addictively obsessive-compulsive, a little feral-is from another galaxy, or maybe another century. Originally published by a small Irish press, the slim collection bears comparison to other authors transparently contending with how to be and how to write, such as Heidi Julavits and Karl Ove Knausgaard, whose publishing company acquired translation rights. Narrated by a disaffected academic living in seclusion in a stone cottage on the west coast of Ireland, the book consists of diary-like short stories, meditations on everything from the best way to eat porridge (black jam, carefully arranged almond flakes) to “the essential brutality of love.” Reading them, one thinks of the expansiveness of isolation and the astonishing range of sound to be found in contemplative quiet. It’s the morning after the Brexit vote, and the inky-haired young English author, via Skype from Galway, has been talking about a leave-taking of her own, one that led her to write her first book, Pond (Riverhead). It’s life I want to put on the page,” says Claire-Louise Bennett, paraphrasing Anaïs Nin. “I’m not interested in producing literature.

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