Jacques Picton’s Reviews > Pond > Status Update

The Gloves Are Off might be my favourite so far. The disappointment over the reeds being from Turkey rather than the River Shannon made me laugh but also felt strangely sad. The narrator does not just love objects themselves but the worlds she imagines around them, and there is something moving about watching reality interrupt those possibilities.

The Deepest Sea complicates the narrator’s relationship with objects. The fountain pens are another example of how she finds meaning in small physical things, but they also reveal how objects carry memories and connections to people. She seems drawn not just to things themselves, but to the stories and imagined possibilities she builds around them.

Just finished “control knobs”. I love how the narrator’s thoughts spiral from the smallest details into whole imagined worlds. An oven is never just an oven and a cucumber is never just a cucumber.

I’ve just read “to a god unknown”. She writes about a storm. I would actually say she is personifying it, but not in a conventional way. Personification doesn’t necessarily mean “turning something into a human because humans are the centre of everything.” For her, it almost feels like the reverse. She doesn’t elevate nature by making it human; she treats nature as already possessing its own presence.

In The Big Day, I’m noticing again that the narrator gives more emotional weight to objects and the natural world than to people. The neighbours remain on the outside both literally and figuratively. She can turn something as ordinary as a portaloo into an ally, yet seems unable or unwilling to find the same camaraderie with those around her.

I already find being inside this narrator’s head strangely comforting. I feel like I know less about the facts of her life and more about the way she sees the world, the tiny habits, preferences and observations that make up a person. It reminds me of Amélie.

The green bananas stayed with me: such a small detail, but because I also like my bananas slightly underripe, it created a feeling of recognition.