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1Fix the driver behind crashes, sound loss and screen glitches2Repair Windows errors before they cause bigger problems3Scan for outdated or missing drivers - takes under a minuteIn Janice Pariat’s novel Everything the Light Touches, the question “What is our relationship with the world?” is explored through the ways people see, name, and inhabit the living world. Pariat uses botany as a metaphor: classifying nature is one way of knowing it, while attending to connection and wholeness is another. Four journeys across different eras bring those approaches into conversation.
What the question means in Pariat’s novel
The title comes from a Scroll interview with Pariat about Everything the Light Touches, published on 4 October 2023. Rather than offer a single scientific answer to the question, the novel asks how habits of seeing shape relationships with the natural world. Its botanical ideas meet questions about knowledge, colonial and modern histories, urban and rural life, capitalism, and traditions of generosity and gratitude.
In a Kunzum interview, Pariat describes botany as a metaphor for ways of seeing: “I’m interested in the intersection between botany and philosophy—how you see a plant (whether as a whole or a collection of parts) is how you see the world.” The contrast is part of her framing of the novel, not a claim that science or either historical thinker can be reduced to one doctrine.
Four lives, connected by botanical thought
The book links four figures across distinct periods and places. Pariat says the strands developed through her research and writing: “Evie led me to Goethe, Goethe led me to Linnaeus, and eventually, all these stories are cradled by Shai’s narrative, which offers us what I like to call the long perspective.”
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- Shai, a young Indian woman travelling in Northeast India, encounters Indigenous communities and ways of living that prompt a renewed perspective.
- Evelyn, an Edwardian student at Cambridge inspired by Goethe’s botanical writing, travels in search of a plant in the forests of the Lower Himalayas.
- Carl Linnaeus, the botanist and taxonomist, appears during his 1732 expedition to Lapland.
- Johann Wolfgang von Goethe travels in Italy in the 1780s, where the novel follows his botanical thinking.
Classification and connection as ways of seeing
Pariat contrasts the Linnaean approach she discusses—separating, distinguishing, labelling, and categorising—with a Goethean emphasis on holism, unity, connection, and imagination. In the novel, that difference opens onto a larger question: does knowing the living world mean dividing it into named parts, or learning to perceive relationships among those parts?
The contrast also touches on how knowledge is produced, particularly in colonial contexts, and on the consequences of different relationships with nature. It is best read as an interpretive tension in Pariat’s account of the book, not as a verdict that classification is inherently wrong or that the two historical figures held only the simplified positions described here.
Rank #2
- Everything the Light Touches
- Independently published
- ABIS BOOK
Why travel matters to the story
Travel gives the novel a way to place its characters in unfamiliar settings and changing circumstances. Pariat describes the journeys as a means of exploring worldviews that hold to fixity and those that call for fluidity. Unexpected events reveal how characters respond when familiar assumptions are unsettled; movement across places and eras lets the book test its ideas through lived choices rather than abstract argument alone.
Pariat’s personal attention to nature
In a 2022 Hindustan Times interview, Pariat recalled that spending lockdown in a small flat with a garden changed how she noticed plants, forests, and wildflowers. She described plants as connected to changing seasons, light, shade, and sunshine. This is her personal reflection on attention to the natural world, not evidence that the novel makes a scientific claim.
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Publication context
Scroll reported on 4 October 2023 that Everything the Light Touches was longlisted for the 2023 JCB Prize for Literature. That is the prize status reported at the time of the interview.
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Sources
- Scroll interview with Janice Pariat, Sayari Debnath, 4 October 2023
- Kunzum interview with Janice Pariat, Sumeet Keswani, 22 January 2023
- Talking About Books interview, 22 June 2023
- University of Hyderabad, Indian Writing in English, 2023
- Hindustan Times interview with Janice Pariat, 2022
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