Janice Pariat's Everything The Light Touches | On the longlist of JCB Prize for Literature (2023)

Title: Everything That Light Touches
Author: Janice Pariat
Publisher: HarperCollins India (2023)
Genre: Literature, Nature
ISBN: 978-9356291393
Hardcover: 512 Pages
Buy the book: Amazon 

In Janice Pariat's book, "Everything the Light Touches," she seamlessly blends research with imagination across centuries. The narrative delves into the lives of four individuals: Shai, Evelyn, Johann (Goethe), and Carl, whose journeys are interconnected like the roots of an ancient Banyan tree.

In her previous work, "Nine Chambered Heart," Pariat employed a unique narrative technique, recounting the girl's story through various characters, including teachers, lovers, and flatmates. In "Everything the Light Touches," she continues with this approach, using multiple perspectives, to enrich the narrative.

The central character of the story is Shai, a woman in her thirties. The book begins with Shai's journey as she prepares to fly from Delhi airport to her hometown, Meghalaya—a place seemingly forgotten by its own country. ‘We land in a place that falls off the map. So far east in this vast country that it feels not of this country anymore.’ 

While each of us must eventually return to our origins, Shai is concerned about her family and community.

Pariat in an interview: We live in a world of very unequal stories, where someone like Karl Linnaeus will be known but somebody from a small little corner of India's northeast, who might have the same amazingly profound ideas about our relationship to the natural world, will quite easily be dismissed. It was very important for me to place these stories also on the same plane, so that Goethe and Linnaeus exist amidst all of these other characters who are equally valid, equally important.

Pariat excels at crafting multi-dimensional characters, and it's the small details that breathe life into her work. For instance, when Shai reunites with her mother, Pariat vividly describes the encounter, ‘it’s been less than a year since I’ve seen her—in which secret hours did she age? When I hug her, though, she smells familiar, of wool and naphthalene and hand cream…’

The narrative then shifts to Evelyn, deeply passionate about botany, and less interested in conventional life. Frustrated by the lack of academic opportunities in England, she embarks on a journey to India, to explore the Himalayan flora and fauna.

One of the most innovative chapters belongs to Carl. Pariat fearlessly experiments with storytelling in this section, incorporating approximately 40 micro-poems that are both lyrical and comforting. These poems range from one-liners to free verses, with "How to Hunt a Bear" consisting of just three words: "Do not miss."

SIGNS

The peasants who reside near the cliffs or rising ground judge by the crows the approach
of bad weather; for these birds seek the marshy country before it comes on.
They say they have been reading such signs for years.   

Here, I am borrowing the words of Nilanjana Roy: Everything the Light Touches is a magnificent reminder that the natural world does not lie outside of ourselves, and that when we break trust with the earth, we break our own spirits into scattered fragments. Janice Pariat finds a new language of connection, wonder, and loss, for the songs of the earth from Lapland and Goethe's Europe to the Lower Himalayas and remote villages in India's Northeast, her stories dancing between centuries in this generous and intricate work.

As Henry Miller said, "One's destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things." 

Janice Pariat's "Everything the Light Touches" is not just a book but a grand narrative that delves into the essence of existence, human bonds spanning ages, botanical wonders, poetic beauty, and profound discoveries. It has earned a place on the longlist of the JCB Prize for Literature in 2023.

  

About the Author

Janice Pariat is the author of Boats on Land: A Collection of Short Stories, Seahorse: A Novel, and the international bestseller The Nine-Chambered Heart. She was the recipient of the Young Writer Award from the Sahitya Akademi and the Crossword Book Award for Fiction in 2013. Janice's work has been translated into ten languages. She teaches at Ashoka University, and lives between New Delhi and Shillong with a cat of many names.

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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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