Pond by Claire-Louise Bennett
What a strange and wonderful little book. As far as I can tell it really has no plot or action, and just one real character, who gives us an extended monologue, but not really an interior one. She is talking to someone, self-consciously at times. What really struck me is how familiar it felt. Maybe because what it captures has some similarities to my own brand of neuroticism–but the psychology of it never feels, even for a moment, manufactured or contrived. So many passages just felt true, and sort of shameless in a way, just documenting her inner world and experience, that I stopped marking them.
Could there really be another person–the writer, her character–who shares all these different bits of my strangeness?
Amy P. Knight 