In his strange and bewitching book The Poetics of Space, postman turned physicist turned philosopher Gaston Bachelard argues that houses are our storage containers our memories and imaginations. They are metaphysical and contain the cosmos—the poetry of life. He explains it thus, “I should say: the house shelters day-dreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace.”

Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond—which was marketed as a collection of short stories upon its celebrated debut last year in Britain, but was packaged as a novel upon its celebrated debut in America—makes much of Bachelard’s metaphysical reasoning. Bennett even gives a clue about what similarly strange and surreal stuff she is up to in Pond by quoting Bachelard in her epigraph: “Wolves in shells are crueler than stray ones.” Gnaw on that bone for a while.

Pond’s focus is on the house, inside and out—traditionally considered the domain of the wife and her servants, and historically disregarded as a territory of fiction written by women. The book is comprised of twenty stories or chapters—whatever the reader prefers, perhaps—of the narrator in her cottage and on its grounds, making a case that she, the natural world, and the house are a part of the same ecosystem—even co-evolved organisms. In “To A God Unknown” she describes this shared corporeality,

A leaf came in through the window and dropped directly onto the water between my knees as I sat in the bath looking out. It was a thoroughly square window and I had it open completely, with the pane pushed back against the wall. It was there, level with the rim of the bath—I didn’t have to stretch or lean; it was almost as if I were in the coniferous tree that continued upwards, how tall.

Bennett isn’t the first to take this approach, certainly Virginia Woolf made her house alive in the “Time Passes” chapter of To the Lighthouse. After the Ramseys have shut up the summer house for the season, the reader is given a nearly characterless chapter of the house as it breathes:

Nothing stirred in the drawing-room or in the dining-room or on the staircase. Only through the rusty hinges and swollen sea-moistened woodwork certain airs, detached from the body of the wind (the house was ramshackle after all) crept round corners and ventured indoors.

POND, by Claire-Louise Bennett Riverhead, pp. 208, $26

But unlike Woolf’s closed up summer house, Pond’s house is not empty. The rented cottage is seemingly occupied by the same narrator, a nameless woman, a recluse who finds herself most at ease in the mundanity of her days. She has set herself as apart as much as she can from the busy, commercial world. She composts, she gardens, she ruminates on how to fix the broken nobs on her hob and obsesses about how to properly sweep leaves. These are the minutiae the narrator shares, it’s the mud she wades through, and her path is murky and unclear; answers to who she is, where she is, why she is there, and how she manages to get by are not proffered to the reader. Muddiness is not typically a positive description for a narrative, but this mud is sparkling, full of mica and minerals that glitter with color when the sun’s rays hit. It’s through this glistening mud that Bennett’s readers get to mudlark, mucking about in prose that is alternatively deliberate and crisp, surrealistic and unknowable, to find real gems of observation and language.