Claire-Louise Bennett

I sometimes didn't know what was going on—but that was perfectly OK, and even, dare I say, right. I feel there's some mystery at the end that I'll spend the rest of my life unsuccessfully, yet sort of thrillingly, trying to figure out.

This book has the kind of voice I really enjoy, a very close first-person narration by a protagonist whose thoughts range widely as she goes about her day, mostly thinking about the story she's writing and about literature in general.

Graham Greene. Gore Vidal. Nabokov. E. M. Forster. So many men for the simple reason I wanted to find out about men, about the world they lived in and the kinds of things they got up to in that world, the kinds of things too that they thought about as they show more drifted out of train stations, hung about foreign ports, went up and down escalators, barreled through revolving doors, looked out of taxi windows, lost a limb, swirled brandy around a crystal tumbler, followed another man, undressed another man's wife, lay down upon a lawn with arms folded upon their chest, cleaned their shoes, buttered their toast, swam so far out to sea their head looked like a small black dot.

It's the kind of writing that is immersive when the time is taken to allow the flow of the words to take over one's own thoughts. The narrator here is so thoughtful, curious and honest that her voice is very good company, erudite and unpretentious. I will certainly be reading more by this author.

We confused life with literature and made the mistake of believing that everything going on around us was telling us something, something about our own little existences, our own undeveloped hearts, and, most crucially of all, about what was to come. What was to come? What was to come? show less

The narrator of Checkout 19 is a writer circling around events in her personal history that presage or contribute to her becoming the writer that she becomes. Often these events do not reveal themselves as significant initially. But as they are considered and reconsidered, or rewritten, they gain in significance. They gain in significance even as they change in detail, sometimes gaining details that weren’t there on first telling, sometimes contradicting earlier iterations. And almost like show more a Greek chorus, there are books, both those read by the narrator and those unread, or not yet read, that swirl about her as impactful, perhaps, as other events less mediated. There is the all important first story, barely an aberration from doodling, that gets seen and welcomed by a significant teacher. And there are other stories, far more elaborate, which display the narrator’s burgeoning prowess as a wordsmith. And ever and again there is that Russian man circling the aisles in the grocery store.

Claire-Louise Bennett is an extraordinary writer. In these chapters, it is a though she is challenging herself, with each further chapter a more daring attempt either at narrative intricacy, symbolism, or empathy for the narrator’s younger self. A fascinating and sometimes daunting read.

Highly recommended. show less

This is a stream-of-consciousness novel about reading and writing. The narrator talks about how she read books as a kid, lists the books she had and had not read at a certain age, describes some pivotal moments in her life, and describes in great detail a novel that she wrote (and, like Borges's map, in describing the novel, she essentially writes it again). The thread that ties all of this together is the extent to which books - both those she reads and those she writes - do and do not show more relate to real life. In particular, she focuses on the scene in A Room With A View where Lucy witnesses the murder of the Italian man in the piazza. As the narrator travels to Venice, and experiences her own upheavals in life, she comes back to that scene and how her own experience was similar or different. Since the book is stream-of-consciousness, it seems to ramble very arbitrarily, but there is a stunning moment towards the end of the book when the whole thing comes into very sharp focus. This is not an easy book to read, but Bennett is brilliant and the payoff is worth it. show less