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Summary
Summary
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018
LONGLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2018
SHORTLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2018
A BEST BOOK OF 2017
Financial Times
The Guardian
The Daily Telegraph
The Observer
"Meena Kandasamy's vivid, sharp and precise writing makes a triumph of When I Hit You."--The Guardian
Set in modern India, the unnamed narrator falls in love with a university professor and agrees to be his wife. Based on the author's own experience of marriage, soon the newly-wed experiences extreme violence at her husband's hands and finds herself socially isolated. Intellectual and physical cruelty is explored. Yet hope keeps her alive. Writing becomes her salvation, a supreme act of defiance and, as the subtitle suggests, the novel is also about the act of writing itself and the way that fiction and stories can help you escape.
Though a harrowing story, Kandasamy's writing is also funny, tender, and lyrical. When I Hit You is smart, fierce, and courageous.
Summary
India dei giorni nostri. Lei è una scrittrice, una poetessa, una giovane attivista dal passato tormentato e il cuore spezzato. Lui è un docente universitario, un ex guerrigliero maoista, un uomo che, parlando della rivoluzione, sembra più intenso di qualsiasi poesia, più commovente di qualsiasi bellezza. Si conoscono, si innamorano, decidono in fretta di sposarsi. La coppia si trasferisce in una lontana città costiera dell'India, senza vincoli né programmi, pronta a un salto nel vuoto che li vedrà protagonisti insieme. Lì, dietro le porte ben chiuse di una villetta circondata da un giardino selvaggio, il marito perfetto cambia volto, trasformandosi poco a poco in un carceriere e in un carnefice. La limitazione delle libertà della moglie - vestiti, trucco, capelli; e poi: email, telefonate, fino al divieto di scrivere - traccia l'inizio di una spirale di violenza e sopraffazione che vedrà la donna sempre più sola e terrorizzata, abbandonata anche dalla famiglia di origine. Finché lei stessa non deciderà di reagire riprendendo in mano il controllo della propria storia.
Author Notes
Meena Kandasamy is a poet, fiction writer, translator, and activist who lives in Chennai and London. She has published two collections of poetry, Touch and Ms. Militancy , and the critically acclaimed novel, The Gypsy Goddess . This is her second novel.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Kandasamy's stateside debut, a finalist for the Women's Prize for Fiction when it was published in the U.K. in 2017, offers a brutal, essential narrative of marital abuse and survival. When the unnamed narrator, a politically active Tamil woman living in present-day southern India, meets her eventual husband, a college lecturer and former guerrilla fighter, she is initially energized by his Marxist politics and idealistic worldview. After the two marry, the husband's theorizing becomes inverted and toxic, as he conjures up intellectual justifications for enforcing extreme social isolation on his wife, and repeatedly beats and rapes her. Kandasamy's novel blends painfully raw scenes of physical and sexual violence with the narrator's vibrant interiority, which includes musings on India's "bachelor politicians," influential men who publicly reject marriage and family in service of their country while taking advantage of women, and her growing realization that narrating her own abuse may help her survive it. She also powerfully addresses the inevitable question of why women stay with their abusers. The answer has to do with hope, and the narrative of a short-lived but devastating marriage is surprisingly hopeful as well. This visceral and sophisticated account is both terrifying and triumphant. (Mar.)
Kirkus Review
A novel about contemporary Indian intellectuals highlights an age-old problem.The unnamed protagonist escaped from her abusive husband five years ago when this powerful novel opens, so the suspense is not whether she'll survive but whether she'll be allowed to tell her own story. The woman's mother has been telling the story to relatives, neighbors, and circles of friends, focusing on the physical signs of her daughter's abuse and escapeher thinning hair, her cracked heels. But the survivor has decided to tell the story herself, which then becomes the novel at hand. Kandasamy's brilliant and at times brutally funny narrator leads the reader through her emotional journey, from confident college student then published writer to battered wife. She details the unhappy affair that led her to take refuge in her husband's arms and then step by step reveals how he managed to isolate her from friends and family, taking control of a joint email account, managing all social activities. Most damning of all, the woman shows how everyone from the woman's parents to her friends and her doctors either looked the other way or urged her to give her husband another chance. This is a story that could take place in any culture at any time period. What makes this novel unique is the feisty voice of the narrator and the rich details of her intellectual interests and her husband's leftist politics in contemporary India. Kandasamy (The Gypsy Goddess, 2014, etc.) divides her time between Chennai and London, and the novel was shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction and the Jhalak Prize and longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.So long as society does not listen to women, this novel shows, no woman will truly be safe. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction in 2018, this novel from Kandasamy (Exquisite Cadavers, 2019) reflects deeply and meaningfully on an unnamed woman's marriage to an abusive man. Like the book itself, the title captures both the abuse suffered by the woman, who narrates, and the mechanism of her resurrection. "When I Hit You" is a line of poetry written by the narrator's abuser while he simultaneously forbids her from writing her own poetry. After the title's double-fisted colon, readers find her reclamation of self via reference to the literary cannon. Her identity before marriage was as a writer, and her husband's attempts to strip that away fail. She writes anyway, in documents she deletes before he comes home from teaching. She imagines what she will write about being beaten while being beaten, to survive it. The abuse is revealed on page one, a refusal to relegate it to revelatory plot point. Instead, the text focuses on the sadistic step-by-step that morphs an independent, intelligent, Indian woman into an isolated, empty, scared wife. Kandasamy's thoughtful deep dive into the nature of abuse and its effects is a call-to-action to believe and support all women, and Indian women in particular.
Excerpts
Excerpts
SHORTLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018 SHORTLISTED FOR THE JHALAK PRIZE 2018 LONGLISTED FOR THE DYLAN THOMAS PRIZE 2018 Guardian's Best Books of 2017 Daily Telegraph's Best Books of 2017 Observer Best Books of 2017 Financial Times Best Books of 2017 Seduced by politics, poetry, and an enduring dream of building a better world together, the unnamed narrator falls in love with a university professor. Moving with him to a rain-washed coastal town, she swiftly learns that - what for her is a bond of love - is for him a contract of ownership. As he sets about reducing her to his idealized version of an obedient wife, bullying her and devouring her ambition of being a writer in the process, she attempts to push back - a resistance he resolves to break with violence and rape. A chronicle of an abusive marriage and a celebration of the invincible power of art, When I Hit You is a smart, fierce, and courageous take on traditional wedlock in modern India. Kandasamy's insightful dissection of what love means when trust is undermined by violence is a brilliant, throat-tightening feminist discourse on battered faces and bruised male egos. Excerpted from When I Hit You: Or a Portrait of the Writer As a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
