"Tristezza de fiori. The sadness of flowers.
You look at me, and cannot take your eyes away from mine. You repeat the words. The sadness of flowers."
🫀The Nine-Chambered Heart
Janice Pariat 🇮🇳
When someone says, "I know you like the back of my hand", I have this urge to pull out a 100 page question paper made with the intention to fail the person sitting for the test. No, you don't. It's sweet at best and arrogant at its worst. You don't know me.
The sense of bewilderment is almost palpable. We live as fragments. Our entire existence is fragmented. Like a mirror broken into a million pieces, with each shard reflecting a different part of our personas. So, saying "I know you like the back of my hand" is no different than saying, "Darling, I don't know a thing about you."
This book revolves around this idea of fragments which it explores through the portrait painted of a woman as seen through the eyes of nine different individuals. For each of these nine characters, the unnamed woman represents something different, not because the woman herself is incessantly dynamic but because of the subjective lenses used by the people to view her. None of them really know her. She remains a mystery to those around her. I was afraid that she would turn into a manic-pixie dreamgirl sort of character but thankfully that didn't happen.
She was flawed. She was human. She loved. I think the book manages to capture that essense of the human capacity to give love even though we may fail to accept it sometimes.
Pariat's words flows like a clear stream of water. It is neither too laid-back nor too complicated to the point of inaccessibility. I think I could read anything she writes because there's a deep sense of empathy and respect for the human condition to love in her use of language.