I finished the audiobook of Claire-Louise Bennett’s second book Checkout 19 a few minutes ago, or really, a few minutes before I started writing this blog.
Bennett reads the book herself.
Sometimes listening to an author read their own writing is revelatory; the author imposes a performance that the prose alone, particularly the syntax, couldn’t conjure in your mind’s ear. There’s more to the work than you’d imagined. (And then, later, when you settle down, maybe you realize: there’s less.)
And sometimes hearing the author read their own work is painful. It’s not the writer’s fault, necessarily, but they shouldn’t be encouraged to visit microphones. They ham it up, or their restraint cools the prose, or, maybe they’re just nervous. They wrote the book to be read, not audited, maybe.
The other category of audiobooks read by their authors, or one of the other categories of audibooks read by their authors, is in my estimation the optimal experience: The writer reads their book in the most natural of manners, as if reading something they’d worked on for months or years or whatever into a digital audio file was just a natural thing, a normal thing, and that the author, the reader—the author is the reader, now, of her own work—the author can read her own work without a veil of artifice, without a smirk, without hedging.
Claire-Louise Bennett’s reading of Claire-Louise Bennett’s book Checkout 19 falls into this third category. The experience is unforced, an adjective that I don’t know what to do with now that I’ve written it. I’ll retreat to summary and description for a moment then: the audiobook of Claire-Louise Bennett’s Checkout 19, as read by Claire-Louise Bennett, is not quite seven hours long. It is divided into seven chapters, and, generally, very generally speaking, offers a kind of early autobiography through reading and writing. It is a kind of Künstlerroman, a word I learned in college which is not really useful here. In more contemporary terms it might be called autofiction, although I don’t know what that means either.
The chapters of Checkout 19 circulate not circularly in an elliptical rhythm, tracing and retracing foundational moments in Bennett’s, or Bennett’s narrator’s, life.
(I don’t believe for a minute that anything in Checkout 19 is false, even the embellishments, even possible lies.)
These moments are primarily connected to reading and writing, and something that I loved about Checkout 19 was how often Bennett concretized how physical and temporal reading and writing are: How we remember not just what or why we read or wrote, but also where, and when, and how: Where did we find spaces to carve out our own little stories? What were the beautiful covers of books we failed to read yet nevertheless lugged around with us? Why are some pens suited for drawing but not writing?
We get Bennett’s narrator sussing out the world of letters from a young age. Her Roald Dahl is the same Roald Dahl who wrote her mother’s copy of Switch Bitch, but he’s not the same Roald Dahl. Later, a boyfriend worries that Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton might not be good for her, and tries to keep them from her. He’s the same boyfriend who gets way too into Bukowski, embarrassing really. And even later (as a sort of capping grace on this motif in the story) Bennett’s narrator reclaims Anaïs Nin from freshman dorms everywhere, declaring her a talent to be reread later. Bennett’s book made me want to revisit Anaïs Nin, who I’ll admit I’ve compartmentalized along with Plath, Sexton, and Bukowski as writers I read in college.
There are lots of other books that pop up, full lists at times, canon-making, frankly (enough to make me order a physical copy of the book), but E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View, which I have never read, is a major touchstone. Checkout 19 didn’t make me want to read A Room with a View, but I did relate very strongly to a moment when Bennett’s narrator admits to misremembering a key detail in the narrative in a way that fundamentally impacts her life.
Bennett also weaves and estimable biography of the avant garde writer Ann Quin into Checkout 19, which I hope will lead lots of people to read the novels of the avant garde writer Ann Quin. (Start with Berg.)
What else, what else? So much else—boyfriends and obsessions, mean girls and chronic boredoms, a Russian magician, bearing Nietzsche books, a hanged man at the children’s park. Bennett smuggles in a magnificent, strange story in, the life of one Tarquin Superbus, who acquires an impossible library only to find every book blank and null. Only Tarquin Superbus’s mentor assures him that there’s a magic sentence hiding somewhere in there—he just needs to hunt for it. The story is like something from Eco or Calvino, and I would’ve lapped up more of it.
What else, what else? There were parts that cracked me up to no end, as when the narrator lends her copy of a Paul Bowles novel—must’ve been The Sheltering Sky—to a guy who had had some flowers he’d bought for himself ruined while attempting to bicycle them home. She witnesses a car drive over the flowers and sees her friend, or acquaintance maybe, upset, and decides to loan him the Bowles novel when she meets him at the pub, but he’s too caught up in the story of his destroyed flowers to really take note, and he doesn’t even open the book—which Bennett’s narrator had purchased in Morocco or Algeria (look, I can’t remember right now, I don’t have a physical copy)—and he doesn’t even open The Sheltering Sky (it couldn’t have been Let It Come Down, right?), he just keeps retelling the story of his flowers destroyed, ever more tragic. Worst of all, he hates that she’s already witnessed the flowers’ ruin: he can’t tell his tragedy. She never gets the book back. And isn’t that always the way?
If you read and loved Bennett’s first book Pond like I did, you’ve probably already read Checkout 19 or put it into some stack to get to. If you haven’t read Pond, read Pond—and then check out Checkout 19. Great stuff.
Biblioklept 