The stories in Claire-Louise Bennett’s “Pond” convey a sense of real time. Photograph by John Greim / LightRocket / Getty

Three-quarters of the way through Claire-Louise Bennett’s début collection, “Pond,” there’s a story called “Morning, 1908” that altered my state of consciousness like a drug. It begins simply, with the collection’s unnamed narrator, who lives mostly in solitude on the west coast of Ireland, deciding to take a walk on a damp afternoon. This is the time, she says, “when my mind is least disposed to fuss or hypothesis.” The rain has stopped, but the sound of it continues; tiny drops slide down through thick trees with the sound of a “squandered chandelier dashing headlong down the hillside,” a noise that could cause a “peripheral insanity” if you stopped and listened too long.

So she heads down a road where she often sees cars passing. She sees a hooded man. The sight is so alarming that it sets her “blood and organs into crashing disarray until I was soon drained of all former purpose, as slender as that was.” She braces herself against a fence. “Unable to withstand or accommodate the panic,” she says, “I found myself attempting to wrong-foot it with the speculation that perhaps the worst thing that could happen right now might not be quite as diabolical and frenzied as the thought of it jaggedly decreed.” By “it,” she means rape—and right away she tries to ratchet the vision down. Maybe it’ll be “fairly recreational, like the way dogs are,” she thinks. It occurs to her that she’ll pee on him during the act; it’s still raining, she’s had a lot of ginger tea. “Wouldn’t it serve him right?” And then: “I became aware of myself from the young man’s perspective—my shabby sealskin boots, the cerise snowflake pattern around the top of my thick Norwegian socks, the thin lace trim along the hem of my nightdress. My damp unbrushed hair. Nothing happened of course. I stood at a gate and a young man passed by. That was all.” The imagined danger is all the more frightening for the swiftness of her acceptance—the toll many women pay to make the experience of danger go away.

The narrator looks around at the pasture, at the cows, the incremental sunset. She thinks of the imagined rape, a vision that “had not been incited by fear of him but rather by the horror I had felt towards my own twisted longing.” She walks back home as the man’s figure recedes, dispassionately narrating the mundane psychosis familiar to anyone who has ever spent too much time alone. The world “gathered in dreadful suspension,” then “glided backwards into an atmosphere of broadening redundancy, intersected by a vertical and rather searing sense of abnegation.” In her house, she steps out of her boots and starts looking through a book of photographs. The night is like any other.

“Pond,” which was first published, last year, by a small press in Ireland, is not organized around a narrative, and few of its twenty stories are, either. What moves the reader forward is the sense the stories convey of a real-time psychological fabric: the reader experiences the narrator’s world at the same pace she does, a thing chopped up into irregular units organized by vague questions and obscurely colored moods. Like Lydia Davis, Bennett, who is from the southwest of England, takes a state of mind closely associated with madness and places it in settings that are utterly domestic, mundane. The result is fervid and fearful; at times, “Pond” recalls works by Knut Hamsun and Samuel Beckett, in which characters are more obviously forced into states of isolation.

At other points, the book evokes the cottage hymns of Katharine Tynan, the pure formal eccentricity of Emily Dickinson, and the dread-laced, detonating uncertainty of W. B. Yeats. It is also funny. “Morning, 1908” follows a four-sentence story called “Oh, Tomato Puree!” that is as silly as it sounds. A two-sentence story called “Stir-Fry” reads, in its entirety, “I just threw my dinner in the bin. I knew as I was making it I was going to do that, so I put in it all the things I never want to see again.”

Bennett has written that “in solitude, you don’t need to make an impression on the world, so the world has some opportunity to make an impression on you.” “Pond” can be seen as a photonegative of “Walden,” in which Henry David Thoreau similarly spends most of his time alone near a small body of water. But Bennett’s narrator shares none of Thoreau’s psychologically industrious self-reliance. Solitude makes her unbiddable, nearly necromantic. While Thoreau repeatedly announces his intention to solidify a deliberately staked position in the world, the narrator of “Pond” sets about dissolving. The book’s title refers to a sign that labels a nearby pond “Pond”—the sign bothers the narrator terribly, as it prevents the pond from speaking for itself, and blocks a “deep and direct accordance with things.”

When the narrator does achieve that direct accordance with things, the effect is unnerving. As she listens to a storm in the shower, for instance: “I knew it was an old one that had come back … I moved a web of lather about the roots of my hair and became immersed in the body of the storm; I knew its structure, saw its eyes, felt its past, and I empathized with its entreaty.” Thoreau might have siphoned insight from his surroundings; Bennett’s narrator osmoses into hers completely.

In one story, she needs to find a new control knob for her oven, and the project makes her think of the “knack of living,” the “magic of dying,” the greasiness of this hypothetical suicide method, and what it would be like to be the last woman in the world. Then she discovers that the knobs have been discontinued. “I feel quite at a loss for about ten minutes and it’s a sensation, I realise, that is not entirely dissimilar to indifference. So, naturally, I handle it rather well.” The story tightens on her real concern: a sense of transience and vulnerability that was located only temporarily in the knob. She wonders if she feels transient and vulnerable because she never learned the history of the land she lives on. But that history, she decides, “comes at you directly, right through the softly padding soles of your feet, battering throughout your body, before unpacking its clamouring store of images in the clear open spaces of your mind.” And in the end, that history tells her, “All the names mean nothing to you, and your name means nothing to them.”

The narrator of “Pond” is not insane, it’s important to note. She is sensitive to the point of being porous, but she is also lucid, practical, and excruciatingly cognizant of what is normal. At various points in the book, she holds a job at a bike shop, sends her first obscene e-mails, presents a paper at an academic conference. Nonetheless, it’s in her house, in her garden—alone with herself, and unravelling—where she can return to her real business of magnifying a quality of exquisite attention to the point of irrationality, a mind deliberately astray.

There is a passage from Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” that came to mind often as I read. Rubashov, the prisoner, sits alone in his cell and becomes aware that what we think of as a first-person singular is really a first-person plural—that we use “I” as a way to tease out a silent partner within us, to “gain his confidence and to fathom his intentions.” If you are alone for long enough, the “habitually silent partner” begins to speak, “without being addressed and without any visible pretext.” This partner expresses itself in fragmentary fashion, in senseless sentences and uncontrollable murmurs.