Invisible Bird by Claire-Louise Bennett, 2022
The magic trick:
Masterfully controlling the tone by telling the loud parts and showing the quiet ones
This marked my first experience with Bennett’s work. She’s a very good writer. The sentences just flow so efficiently.
This story demonstrates a particularly keen use of the show-tell dynamic. Our narrator is recalling a certain period in her life – mid-20s, I think – when she floated from home to home, often sleeping on the streets of Dublin, with her boyfriend and no real direction. The resulting mood is oddly sleepy. What could be filled with tension and stress or perhaps even romance winds up on the page as monotonously uncomfortable. A very interesting way to summarize a period of one’s life.
The narrator tells us about the extreme parts. Her boyfriend, we are told, was not a good drinker. We are told of alcohol’s “diabolical effects” on him. We do not, however, ever see this. The things the narrator chooses to show us are far quieter.
This is masterfully controlled storytelling.
And that’s quite a trick on Bennett’s part.
The selection:
Another advantage of staying on Dawson Street was that it was surprisingly quiet all night through. An antiquated shop sign further up the street creaked back and forth, and that was often the only sound I’d hear. The slightest breeze set it off, but it didn’t ever irritate me. It was an old-fashioned sort of sound that seemed somehow to highlight the standstill of everything. A lone sound in a soundless world. An unlatched green gate in the country, a weather vane on top of an empty barn. Paradoxical sounds that bring to mind Proust’s “invisible bird,” that mysterious and lonesome creature “striving to make the day seem shorter, exploring with a long-drawn note the solitude that pressed it on every side, but it received at once so unanimous an answer, so powerful a repercussion of silence and of immobility, that one felt it had arrested for all eternity the moment which it had been trying to make pass more quickly.” Strange to say I did not wish for the nights to be curtailed. On the contrary, I loved the dark, which would not, perhaps, have gathered about me quite so consolingly had that shop sign swung mutely upon its overwrought hinges. When, finally, I put my head down on our rucksack in order to get some sleep, I would feel the iconic glass corners of my perfume bottle prodding into the base of my skull, pervading the slowing thoughts going on inside it with a golden pellucidity that melted away any feelings of discomfort entirely.
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