pond [claire-louise bennett]

I am seated in the upper terrace of the food court in Paddington Station. On the table is a coffee of some description, a piece of carrot cake, a phone, this laptop and a book. The book is called Pond. It’s published by Fitzcarraldo, and their books are highly distinctive, with the same blue cover, so if anyone were to pass by who knew anything about them, they might say to me - Which one is that? But I don’t think that’s going to happen. Neither is the author of the book going to appear and say, Oh look, you’re reading my book. Because these things don’t happen. Not in London anyway. They might do in Montevideo. I’m musing about this somewhat idly because I met the author a few months ago, in Montevideo, and told her that when I went back to London, I’d read Pond. I could have bought it as a kindle book beforehand I suppose but I had a feeling that I wouldn’t want to read it digitally. Some books you can read on a screen, and some you can’t. Or, if you do, they lose something. For something reason. Anyway, I’m reading it now. And I can’t remember all that much. It was a sunny day in a leafy garden, Spring time. I was with the man from the British Council, who I don’t really know, and who, it emerged, had an interest in punk, which made him seem far more human than most men from the British Council, who belong to a strange organisation which merely exists in order to remind people that once upon a time, Great Britain, (to give it one of its names) was a concept that had cultural weight, a weight that is now so diminished or crinolined that you’d struggle to feel it if it cuddled up and nestled in your arms. I’ve finished my coffee. That last remark might not be fair to the British Council. It might be full of a vibrant modernity I’ve never been observant enough to discern. Anyway, that was a few months ago and the three of us had a convivial conversation about how novels do or don’t work and I threw in the name of Bernhard as a reference for where I thought the author might be coming from, but I was winging it really, just chucking stuff out there, as you do. Now that I’m actually reading the book it makes me think about other writers. Like Proust or Joyce, or my friend who wrote to me for two months about nothing at all, really, just the fluff of life, and it was the most captivating thing in the world. And I thought that writing, real writing, is the capturing of the parallel life that we constantly live. The life we lead in our minds alongside the life we lead with our bodies. Not the life we lead with the things we say or do. All the rest. The warp and the woof. Which is the hardest thing of all to capture because it’s always just there and then it’s gone. And if you try and capture it and you don’t do it ever so well it’s just verbiage. Cabbage. Some kind of hideous puree which is supposedly nutritious for babies but tastes like recycled codswallop. But if you do it right, it’s like a magic trick. Someone just came over and removed the empty coffee cup and the wrapping of the now-consumed carrot cake. They took them away whilst I was writing and although I looked up at them they didn’t even glance at me. Let alone the blue book on the table. It’s so hard to connect in the modern world that it’s a miracle whenever anyone succeeds. On which note I should probably go to Heathrow and catch my flight back to South America.