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Boats On Land (2012)

by Janice Pariat(Favorite Author)

3.95 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

818400074X (ISBN13: 9788184000740)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Vintage Books

review 1: Populated by quirky, interesting characters from the hills (and Shillong is one of the predominant characters with its misty peaks, crooked lanes, beautiful people and nasty traffic), Boats on Land is an evocative collection of short stories that provides hard-to-find observations about people's lives in the hills of north eastern India. Immigrant crisis looms over many of the stories like an omnipresent dark cloud while few other are peppered with personal, domestic crises. Lucidly felt and written, Janice and her writing signify the rise in the new breed of writers from the north east similar to her ilk - Anjum Hasan, Jahnavi Barua, Siddhartha Deb and many more.
review 2: Janice Pariat's first collection of short stories "Boats on Land" is one of the best boo... moreks that I've read this year. The 15 stories which comprise this book provide a fresh look at one of India's most beautiful landscapes - Shillong. A few stories are of the British era and mostly are set in post-independence India. I found that the stories have a poetic feel to it. Some of them are drawn from the Khasi folklore, some show the political upheaval that the state has gone through and some show the modern trappings of our age. Though the stories are not inter-related, I found that the themes of longing for one's home and a sense to belong runs through the stories. The only negative point I can say is that in a couple of stories, the author seems to come to an ending rather quickly. The poetic flow of the prose comes to an abrupt halt and you come out of that dream-like state and realize that you are not really in Shillong. I have a tendency to stop after every story and see how long it keeps lingering and these stories surely got stuck in my head. less

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