Claire-Louise Bennett delivers us her first amazing novel of precisions, "The pond". Decryption.
- Eccentric or cracked?
The narrator has plastered college to settle in the Irish countryside, near a pond, where she walks thinking of everything and nothing, planting vegetables and going about housework. Changing the knob on her stove can obsess her for days on end, like watching a small piece of the wall where she projects a series of mind-blowing thoughts and fantasies ... So eccentric, yes (the center of her concerns is off-beat) . And cracked? Enough to let in the light.
- An agricultural desire
This writer looks at life and things like no one else. The Anglo-Saxon press finds him related to Virginia Woolf or Emily Dickinson, but to Bennett sauce. Red - in the chapter "O concentrated tomatoes! "- or green - in this passage where, in bed with a fiancé, the narrator suddenly feels a" burning desire "for potatoes, spinach and beans that she has planted in her garden.
- Solitude and sex
She leads a contemplative life in nature and under clouds, alone with her thoughts. But from time to time a lover goes through the scene. And there as elsewhere, finesse and self-deprecating, whether it's telling the exchange of obscene e-mails or his mania to drink when she is with a man to free himself from his soliloquies.
- Cruel love
The book is light on the surface, but the bottom of the pond has its dark corners, covered with destabilizing thoughts. Of which this one: love is dangerous. A brilliant intellectual, she is invited to leave her dear meadows and vegetables for a few hours to hold a conference at a university, where she explains "the essential brutality of love" that "we deliberately seek
as an ideal agent of total self-immolation "and who" after a devouring experience of ecstatic suffering ... delivers us to oblivion, dismembered and dismissed ". Amazement in attendance and total flop.
- Sharp eyes
In addition to an exotic reading of the micro-splendors of everyday life and nature, there is a little helpful domestic guide. But The pond is teeming with examples of how to look at things from close by. Try and you will see: they are no longer the same things. Bennettize yourself by zooming in on what's around you, what will change your environment and - victory! - you will change yourself.
Claire-Louise Bennett's Pond, translated from English by Thierry Decottignies, ed. L'Olivier, € 19.50, released on January 4th.
