Imagine lying here beneath such a pendulous chandelier of lambent gloom – imagine the transporting reflections slipping across their sleek hermetic skins, the assuaging shadows they’d cast as degradation tipped them into slow stately revolutions, the whisperings, the whisperings, the sighs, the melancholy glow. When I was a dismayed student in London I often fantasised about hanging a great many aubergines from the square ceiling of my sketchy boudoir. ‘I’ve always been very taken with aubergines,’ the narrator states in Bennett’s new novel Checkout 19, ‘with the way they are so tightly sheathed in a shining bulletproof darkness.’ Bennett takes an everyday object – the humble aubergine – and lets her mind linger on it, dwelling on fleeting sensations until the object appears different and strange: She likes things, objects, bric-a-brac, and she likes contemplating their dimensions, curvature and tactility.
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