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.