A pond is a body of water reflecting everything touching its boundary. The “I” in the book Pond met the eyes of its secrete partner and talked the talk on behalf of the silent partner. It sounds quite twisted, that’s how the stories went. Everything outspoken was in fact a mirror of the inner self, in somewhat compressed and evaporating way. Distortion was thus expected, and more interesting. Who would connect control knobs of an oven with the thought of death, the greasiness of suicide? The knobs reminded the “I” of the last woman in the world from a book she just read, thanks to the discontinued production of the knobs and the out-fashioned oven. The apocalyptical story in the book of the book wasn’t really horrifying like we have seen in movies, the last woman did not suffer a lot and was coping her survival quite well, until the grieve moment of sitting at a table counting her remaining matchsticks. That was the moment of a sense of vulnerability. I guess the discontinued knobs and the last woman landed the “I” in nowhere and cut her off from history. You by now should have got the idea that the last woman was the same with the “I”, and she identified herself as perfectly redundant in the minute she looked at the mirror. “If we have lost the knack of living, I thought, it is safe bet to presume we have forfeited the magic of dying” – I do not know how she arrived at this, but, hey, I totally agree. In the end of the control knob story, she concluded “All the names mean nothing to you, and your name means nothing to them.” What a jump! Insane indeed.
I am telling you this was the smallest jump in the book. I am almost afraid to label the book as short stories, because there were none. The book was filled with narration of most sensible eerie thoughts at trivial things and places. Intellectual junks or sensation disarrays, however you feel like. The book could speak to me if I was in the right mood, or far out of my range and so ready to dump in the trash can after I cooked it without eating. She was very much a drifter, whom we could hardly be in sync. Dark humor, witty misanthropy, snobbery, melancholies, and countless terms I never heard of, the unnamed protagonist dipped in many ways was nothing pretentious. She was out alone in the open, not worried being judged nor to judge – this was the beauty of living in solitude. Some commented the book Pond as “a photonegative of ‘Walden’” (New Yorker, 2016), because they both were hermits. He was into theories, she was into emotion. And pond vs lake, which is bigger? Judge for yourself.
A few quotations, with my comments:
- it sometimes feels as if one could just about die from disappointment I must concede that in fact in a rather perverse way it is precisely those things I did not get that are keeping me alive ——this is more than wise, it is philosophical!
- I also watched a really terrible film, yet there was something so kindly about it that it was awhile before I could admit how awful it was, but which time its awfulness was somehow indivisible from its kindness, so I carried on with it, right up until the end——acuity or bare?
- I was ill, after all –my defenses were down, I wasn’t quite myself; or, perhaps, I was myself more than ever. Perhaps I was stripped right down to my most vehement hidden currents: transparent and seen through, right there at the gate——the moment of being vulnerable and helpless, expecting an enemy or her knight.
- You are not from a particular place the history of that particular place will dwell inside you differently to how it dwells within those people who are from that particular place——that’s how immigrants often feel in a foreign land, however long we reside there.
- love is indeed a vicious and divine disintegration of selfhood——cruel and true statement about love
- The book carries on beyond where it ends, and no doubt this was the author’s absolute wish——The author said it for her own debut book!
January 20, 2017 USA
