Book Review: The Nine Chambered Heart by Janice Pariat

Title: The Nine Chambered Heart 

Author: Janice Pariat

Publisher: HarperCollins India

ISBN:  978-93-5277-379-4

Genre: Literary Fiction

Pages: 200

Source: Flipkart Review Program

Rating:  5/5

INTRO

Since science says that beating organ exists in our body is a four chambered muscle, but Janice Pariat took the pen and transformed the whole theory. And I am glad she did so.

In her book, the Nine Chambered Heart, Janice has woven an unnamed character, and described her by multiple point-of-views. In simpler words, one character met with nine narrators, and this way generates nine different perspectives. Backdrop of every story changes with respective narrator. So we could perceive the personality of main character into different angles. Vivid and striking at once.

BLURB Says:

You, though, are as beautiful as light splitting through glass.’ Nine characters recall their relationship with a young woman – the same woman – whom they have loved, or who has loved them. We piece her together, much as we do with others in our lives, in incomplete but illuminating slivers. Set in familiar and nameless cities, moving between east and west, The Nine-Chambered Heart is a compendium of shifting perspectives that follows one woman’s life, making her dazzlingly real in one moment, and obscuring her in the very next. Janice Pariat’s exquisitely written new novel is about the fragile, fragmented nature of identity – how others see us only in bits and pieces, and how sometimes we tend to become what others perceive us to be.

STRUCTURE

As Book begins with a fascinating relationship between a student and her art teacher, while in other chapters she meets with a stranger and spend five days with him, and I loved the part which depicts her relationship with a musician.

Janice writes in a story “We feel it’s the right time to be in love...the right age...the right season...and the person is incidental”

In an interview with Firstpost, Janice talks about central character that “I wanted to keep her distant. She remained distant. There was nothing I could do, or wanted to do, to bring her closer to me, to the narrators, to the readers. It was also necessary because this book is about the subjectivity of perspective and its splintering. Having her voice in the narrative would make her the 'authority' so to speak, while this way we're left to imagine what it is she experienced, much as we must do with the people in our lives”

“I wanted to replicate how it is in life, with the people we're with, and love. We never have access to them entirely. Neither them to us. We know each other in fragments and slivers. I guess the book then is about both. The absent central character and the nine who conjure her,” Pariat says. 

As far as writing is concerned, It is smooth and poetic as well. Here, I want to praise Janice’s craft, how she observes such small details of life that binds her reader completely. I liked just how glimpse of love and despair projected in this book. It is so refreshing to know about central character through nine different narrators, who unravels the depth of her identity bit by bit. It silently depicts the truth that somewhere we can’t know someone whole at once, we present in someone’s life, just as bits and pieces. I loved it when reading goes on with pauses only.

This Gem of a book not only makes us entertained but asks a important question, if one person romanticize the relationship same as the other? When two person falls in love, haven’t they carried different memories?  Why did we tend to love those we can’t have them? When we fall in love with someone, we create a perspective about them, and we don’t want them to change, isn’t it selfish to do so?  

Janice Pariat’s Nine Chambered Heart tries to solve the puzzle of human heart which dangles between need and want, and eventually how a personality evolves. The Nine Chambered Heart by Janice Pariat, is totally engrossing and a type of read which should be checked by every reader. I relished it and put it into Highly-Recommended-list!

JANICE PARIAT

ABOUT AUTHOR  

Janice Pariat is the author of Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories and Seahorse: A Novel. She was given the Young Writer Award by the Sahitya Akademi and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction in 2013. In 2014, she was the Charles Wallace Creative Writing Fellow at the University of Kent, Canterbury. She studied English Literature at St Stephen's College, New Delhi, and History of Art at the School of Oriental and African Studies, London. Her work - including art reviews, cultural features, book reviews, fiction, and poetry - has featured in a wide selection of national magazines and newspapers. Currently, she lives in New Delhi.

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Book Review: Memories of Fire by Ashok Chopra

Title: Memories of Fire

Author: Ashok Chopra

Publisher: Penguin Random House India

ISBN:  9780670090341

Genre: Literary Fiction

Pages: 420

Source: Flipkart Review Program

Rating:  4/5

But, nothing it seemed had changed at their old haunt. Even after a gap of over five decades. The wilderness was a hidden gem- quaint and unique. It had not lost any of its charm and was still, in more ways than one, a place of pilgrimage, which evoked a spiritual longing, was it just the well preserved….the treasured emotions of the days gone by that had resurfaced? Was it just nostalgia?

Memories of Fire by Ashok Chopra, is a life journey of five childhood friends, who first met at boarding school in Shimla, in 1950s. All were the same age, with a difference of just about a month or two between each.  There had never been a time when they had not been together like a bunch of quintuplets. But life would take them along separate paths.

Although the story runs in flashback, the first chapter begins with a meeting of these four friends,  after a gap of five decades, and they indulge immediately into memories of past, school day-offs, their beautiful as well as ugly truths and bits of love flings. It is not some contemporary fiction but story embedded with such real incidents, related to Indira Gandhi’s era.    

Here, I want to mention the thing I loved the most about Ashok Chopra’s writing, He has surprising skills of observing small details, Memories of Fire is full of such nostalgic words and scenes, I could almost see those images, as Author mentioned Wooden Phaatak, Atlas Bicycle, Binaca Geetmala on Vividh Bharti, jane eyre’s thornfield hall and many more, It is really fascinating to read about Bishnois Samaj and their rituals, Plus that small part of Begum Akhtar. While reading the book I could tell that Ashok Chopra has lived richly experienced life.

There is not a single protagonist in the story, every character comes with its own past and journey. If I am going to discuss about those five friends then Vijay Thakur was only a Day Scholar among them, Rest were  boarders, and Vijay is so unclear about his life goal, and living in some haveli. At one place, author has woven a scene around Vijay’s thoughts, I could visualize that part, where  Vijay stood in his favourite room of the haveli, that scene filled his heart with resurgent hope, “if the haveli could resurrects itself from its dead past into a life in the present, there was hope that it could step into the future too.”

Apart from the story, if anyone wants to learn, how to draw an character sketch, this book would be a perfect read, As author summoned of Vijay character in few lines — Vijay thakur , help everyone and was ever willing to share their problems. Yet, another unsolved mystery about him was that he never seemed to have any problems of his own, friend would describe them an impenetrable carapace, somewhat of an enigma.

Coming on other friends, second is Deepak, god gifted with phenomenal memory anything he ever read he could easily recall and quote. Deepak would get most upset if an author quoted incorrectly or translated poorly. He was in regular correspondence with eminent writer historian, Khushwant Singh, that part was really fun to read.  

Third one, Reza Ahmed who would really interested to know more about Bishnois- the member of small religious group who are mostly concentrated in the western Thar Desert, which overlaps the area of Punjab and Sindh in Pakistan and runs along the borders of India’s Rajasthan with Gujrat and Punjab. It is really interesting to know how Bishnoi word derived. As Reza’s friend told him that preservation of the environment was their religion. Their rituals, this is a common practice there Bishnoi women are known to suckle young orphaned animals to save their lives.

Forth one, Balbir Singh, Author tried to put some humor with this, he writes, Punjabis have strong sense of their genealogy. If you bring two Punjabis – total strangers- together you can be sure that within five minutes they will have traced each other’s family trees back to at least four or five generations and what’s more in the process would have discovered the kinship between them and if they for some reason failed to find a relationship, they would surely make one up, which would seem very convincing.

And Fifth one, Radhey Shyam, who ends up in Jail, He seemed somewhat daring though, In that conventional environment, he took courage to fall in love with his young female teacher, while he was just a much younger male student. I was curious at one point to know how deeply ingrained faith and arising issues impacts their whole life.

Basically Author, depicts the life of that era when communities were close knit and people come together in each other’s joys and sorrow. Each treat the children of the other as their own, and they spend more time in each other’s homes than in their own. When old tradition and values exist, people share almost every moment of success and failure, happiness and pain.  

As blurb says Memories of Fire is inspired by true events and interspersed with the dark contemporary history of India and Pakistan along remarkably realistic characters who tackle prejudice, prestige, privilege and even prison head-on. It also asks the epic questions: What makes for happiness? Why do people make certain choices and not others? And why do men and women willingly make tremendous sacrifices for those they love?

Ashok Chopra has created an authentic, densely peopled universe with a distinctive period charm. Memories of Fire is a vast, colourful, emotional, political and social journey, with a cast of characters that is interesting, sympathetic and lifelike.

ABOUT AUTHOR  

Author of the bestselling Of Love and Other Sorrows and A Scrapbook of Memories: My Life with the Rich, the Famous and the Scandalous, Ashok Chopra has occupied some of the hottest seats in the Indian book trade-executive editor of Vikas Publishing House, vice president of Macmillan India, publishing director of UBS Publishers, executive director and publisher of the India Today Book Club and Books Today as well as chief executive and publisher of HarperCollins India. Currently, he is the chief executive of Hay House Publishers India and is working on his next book, The Lovers from Rampore. He lives in Gurgaon, near Delhi.