RaveThe HinduGiving us a story as well as the process of creating it, this novella is a brave experiment. But it does not always succeed ... An invention by the French surrealists, exquisite cadavers refers to a game in which words are assembled into a piece of writing by each player in turn. Playing on this technique in her new novel, Meena Kandasamy gives importance to both the story and her process ... This may be a slim book, but she manages to pack in two powerful stories. This is as much a book about the personal as it is about the political; about Britain and Tunisia as it is about India; and about Maya and Karim as it is about Kandasamy ... Filled with insight, wry humour and uncomfortable observations, Kandasamy’s work is a clever little rebuttal. I found the format interesting, but her notes heavy-handed in parts and veering off in different directions. However, as a novella, Exquisite Cadavers manages to grip as well as rattle.
Zadie Smith
MixedThe Hindu (IND)In Smith’s collection of 19 short stories...it’s equally exciting and tiring for us to see [her] process play out, to read her greedy attempts at every other genre — autofiction, dystopian fiction, speculative fiction, fiction that resists being boxed into neat categories. Smith is like the narrator in ‘Downtown’ who says, \'I tried on four different outfits and then just went ahead and wore them all\'. As a result, the collection is not an easy read, but Smith doesn’t intend it to be breezy either ... Grand Union is an eclectic but largely tepid collection. There are many pages of brilliance, of course, given Smith’s wry humour, keen observations, and beautiful writing ... But in other places, narratives dawdle; some seem unfinished — ‘Mood’ reads like the diary entries of a precocious young adult; and some require re-re-reading. I wanted to take some of the stories away from the collection and keep them aside for a separate book, or at least reshuffle them according to the level of risk that Smith has taken with form. Grand Union is in fact a Grand Experiment, in which Smith often abandons plot in favour of the articulation of ideas and anxieties. It no doubt demonstrates her versatility as a writer, but leaves you to fill in the gaps, interpret endlessly, engage with the broken, the shard, and discover new meanings with every read.
