"English, strictly speaking, is not my first language by the way, Claire-Louise Bennett wrote in her first book, 2015's Pond, a series of essayistic stories by an autofictional narrator. What was her first language, then? She doesn't know, and she's still in search of it. I haven't yet discovered what my first language is so for the time being I use English words in order to say things."
"Bennett was concerned then and remains concerned now with finding words to make inner experience legible, and to make familiar objects, places and actions unfamiliar. Pond was a kind of phenomenology of 21st-century everyday female experience, concentrating on the narrator's momentary physical and mental feelings and sensation, isolated from the larger social world. Bennett became an acclaimed avant garde writer, and if acclaimed and avant garde may seem at odds, then that tension has powered her books ever since,"
"In Checkout 19 she showed this phenomenological vision unfurling across a life. It was a kind of Kunstlerroman, a messy, sparkling book that threw together the narrator's early reading history with her early story writing (she retold the picaresque antics of her first literary protagonist, Tarquin Superbus) and her experiences of menstruation and sex. Now in Big Kiss, Bye-Bye Bennett takes on more conventional novelistic territory, while creating a distinctively isolated world."
An autofictional narrator uses English while searching for a first language, seeking words to render inner experience and to make familiar objects, places, and actions unfamiliar. Early prose functioned as a phenomenology of twenty‑first‑century everyday female experience, concentrating on momentary physical and mental sensations isolated from the larger social world. Later work extended that phenomenological vision across a life by weaving reading history, early story‑writing, picaresque retellings, and bodily experiences such as menstruation and sex. A recent novel adopts more conventional novelistic territory, portraying a move to the countryside, the end of an unequal romantic relationship, ongoing loneliness, and an odd correspondence with a former teacher.
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