I read this on a friend's recommendation and loved it very very much. It’s the kind of book to get me fired up and excited about books, to remind me why I love them.
Technically, Checkout 19 tracks a young woman's life, creative awakening, and shifting relationship with the world and people around her. But that is such a boring and standard description of a rich stylistic experiment blending elements of coming-of-age novels, existential literature and essay with modernist prose, flights of creative fancy and jarring temporal shifts. Claire-Louise Bennett's prose is electric, with clear shades of Virginia Woolf and Clarice Lispector while still managing to feel uniquely her own. And she'll often jump into extended passages detailing stories written or imagined by the protagonist, all of which feature a strange and surreal beauty and blend in with the happenings around her. It's not necessarily the most accessible book, but I found it challenging, exciting, and deeply absorbing (seriously this book pulled me in so hard).
One of my favorite things about it is that it often explores the main character's life through books: it's filled with mini essays on real-world books and authors the protagonist has read, and what those books meant to her at specific times in her life. As an autistic girl with a literature hyperfixation, I loved this, and it made me want to reach out in a million different directions and read a million different things. But Bennett never lets these get self indulgent or turn into "hey let me tell you about some books I like" - they're always grounded in her protagonist and her themes (for example, late in the book she dives into the British experimental writer Ann Quin, using an examination of her prose as a jumping off point to explore the psychological effects of working class life).
It's also, again, beautifully written. Here is a random out-of-context sentence:
The image's blaze lit through me, again and again, one and the same as the fervid blood that crackled beneath my pristine skin like wildfire.
Anyways, Checkout 19 was great, and I'm really looking forward to whatever Claire-Louis Bennett writes next