It’s been ages since my last contribution to what I hoped would be a large archive of posts on fantastic paragraphs from fiction and other sources. Two or more years in, I’m only posting my fourth paragraph, and all so far have been from fiction. Oh well. I’ll get on it this year.

This paragraph is from my favourite contemporary novel and a strong contender for my favourite novel ever: Claire-Louise Bennett’s Pond (2015). The whole book is a master-class of prose style, featuring one of the most singularly eccentric and lively narrators I’ve ever encountered–this narrator inhabits that rarefied sphere of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy and Samuel Beckett’s Unnamable. And this is my favourite paragraph in this novel.

It begins so that you’ll think it’ll be a paragraph about gardening–then drifts hilariously toward an entirely different, if not completely unrelated, conclusion:

But the potato plants were still growing! I went over to see my upbeat boyfriend many times and the potatoes and spinach and broad beans didn’t mind one bit and sometimes while I was away I would lie in bed next to him unable to sleep and think of the potatoes and spinach and broad beans out there in the dark and I’d splay my fingers towards the ceiling and feel such yearning! I could recall the soil very well, how dark it was and the smell of it — as if it had never before been opened up, and the canal was nearby, and the moon was always overhead, and spiders would get off their webs for a bit and tentatively come into contact with the still edges of things. We didn’t get along very well but this had no bearing whatsoever on our sexual rapport which was impervious and persuasive and made every other dwindling aspect of our relationship quite irrelevant for some time. We wrote each other hundreds of lustful emails, and by that I mean graphic and obscene. It was wonderful. I’d never done that before, I’d never written anything salacious before, it was completely new to me and I must say I got the hang of it really very quickly. I wish I’d kept them, I wish I hadn’t become quite so unhinged when finally we acknowledged that eighteen months was pretty well as much as we could expect from a relationship based almost entirely upon avid fornication, and thereupon rashly expunged our complete correspondence, which, by then, amounted to almost two thousand emails. I won’t be able to write emails like that again you see – that’s to say I won’t be able to write emails like that for the first time again. And that really was what made them so exciting – using language in a way I’d not used it before, to transcribe such an intimate area of my being that I’d never before attempted to linguistically lay bare. It was very nice I must say to every now and then take a break from cobbling together yet another overwrought academic abstract on more or less the same theme in order to set down, so precisely, how and where I’d like my brains to be fucked right out.

Claire-Louise Bennett, Pond, pp. 15-16)

I bet no one expected to end here based on the beginning. This is only a teaser of what is a superlatively great novel. It’s got no plot, and its action is all in the voice, so be warned. But it’s worth it, so worth it.