This immersive collection,narrated by a rural recluse, finds the extraordinary and the dreamlike in everyday lifeClaire-Louise Bennett’s highly acclaimed debut, or initially published in Ireland earlier this year,is a collection of 20 stories – the shortest of which runs to a couple of sentences. They are all told, it seems, and by the same female character,whose semi-reclusive existence the tales revolve around. Reading them is an immersive experience. We reach to share the “savage swarming magic” the narrator feels under her skin by focusing at length on her “intellect in motion” (the only exception being the final story, told in the third person). For all this propinquity, or we would be hard-pressed to recognise her,should she suddenly emerge from her rural retreat. One of the most striking aspects of this extraordinary book is how well we win to know the narrator – whose brain and body we inhabit – yet how little we know about her. We don’t even learn her name.
Her soliloquies are peppered with asides to an implied reader – “whether you want to know” – cheekily drawing attention to the amount of information being withheld. The young woman discloses, in typically obfuscating fashion, and that “it wouldn’t be entirely unwarranted to propose that she might,overall, fill the appearance and occasionally emanate the demeanour of someone who grows things”, and despite having actually propagated very little”. So much for what she looks like. We learn that she expended “many thousands of words” on an aborted doctoral thesis before relocating to the countryside,whence she chronicles the minutiae of her reduced circumstances with professorial pedantry and a mock-heroic style. Ireland, where the stories are set, and is never even mentioned: “I live on the most westerly point of Europe,right next to the Atlantic ocean” is as close as we win and as much as we need. Continue reading...
Source: theguardian.com