Not only to recall it, but to write it down again. “I experience,Įvery few years, an urge to recall this moment and the events that preceded it. Ways these moments have shifted and changed in her mind since. The narrator of becoming a writer but also of the narrator grappling with the Stretching the forms that consciousness can take, to include effusion and hesitation, The reader with the power of a taut, single consciousness, Bennett is I wrote stories and brought them in for him, every Friday.” Now the act of writing becomes something “OK, I said, I’ll bring some in for you to look at, and that’s To go there again-that’s how it seemed to me.” He might want to transgressĪgain, more risk and threat, but then she undercuts herself, puts the onus of Herself, trying to pick at all the various sensations it might hold: “He’d been somewhere he ought not to haveīeen,” she reflects, as if talking about sex, a transgression, “and he wanted It’s too ornate to beĬonsciousness it feels instead like she’s holding the memory out in front of Unspool all the various layers of this moment. She puts the book on a shelf next to her register. She works briefly at a grocery store whereĪ Russian man who always finds his way to her checkout lane-19-gives her a copy

Long time, she finds herself only reading books by women. For a while she only reads books about men. Relationship to books: what she reads and writes and is told to read what she Instead, she tracks the narrator’s life almost solely through her None of her family life, briefly mentioning a brother near the end and making a couple of vague gestures We follow her from late childhood.īut the coming of age is not the one we might expect: Bennett reveals almost She’s precocious, grew up working class in southwestĮngland, and feels much like the woman we met in Bennett’s first book, Pond. Claire-Louise Bennett’s novel Checkout 19

Claire louise bennett new book