Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett

What a hilarious opening chapter! Written in a song-song, disorientating first-person plural, the narrator gathers her precious books around her and examines reading gestures. It’s a dotty, chattering, squirrel of a voice, a Gollum, and it had me laughing aloud.

Quite often when we make a start on the left page it doesn’t make a great deal of sense to us. No. No. No it doesn’t. And it is only then, isn’t it, that we realise, somewhat reluctantly, that we didn’t read the last few lines of the previous page properly. (5)

The book is Checkout 19 by Claire-Louise Bennett. Written in seven parts, we follow a sort of ‘seven ages’ of a female writer: a child at the outset, a schoolgirl next, and on to old age at the close and a voice encompassing previous iterations.

Checkout 19 is a book about writing: on finding a voice; on diction, location, and character; on rewriting and the self-indulgent purple prose of youth; on the power desire has on writing. It’s about the pursuit of the perfect sentence, and the light and dark inspirations of life. It’s equally about reading: the joy and study and fever of it. Of sharing books and instantly regretting the loan; about the influence of reading on writing, life, and our sense of self - or sense of selves.

There are lists of books read, books unread, and books reread. The narrator examines EM Forster’s A Room with a View and the life of writer Ann Quin. Punctuation comes and goes, sentences sprawl and snap back. Motifs recur, altered with each echo. Similarly, my interest waxed and waned: sometimes gripped, sometimes wandering away.

It’s also about the experience of being a girl, a woman. Of being female. Of being impressed and imposed upon. There’s no linear plot, no plot at all, in fact. If you’re reading Checkout 19, you’re there for the writing: for the playful literary expressions and the raw portrait at the end of a woman alone.

WHAT TO READ NEXT

If you liked Checkout 19, try Outline by Rachel Cusk or The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante