...a very of-the-moment story of domestic abuse ... Intellectual and physical cruelty is explored with Nabokovian ingenuity ... It’s gasp-worthy reading. Reading with the stomach. The process itself becomes precarious and unsafe, trapping you within three rooms in Mangalore. Yet it is also through writing that the only oases come ... though thoroughly harrowing, Kandasamy’s writing is also funny, tender and lyrical, usually simultaneously. When trauma is ever-present, the other qualities only have the option to mix with it ... But Kandamasay’s lyrical register can add a tinge of grandiosity and melodrama that the narrative doesn’t require ... Yet Kandasamy has given us a 3D, complex experience of abuse, full of roundly-explored characters, without compromising the purity of her message.
The narrator of When I Hit You is an outspoken leftist and poet. A millennial, she craves romance and dissects her sexual liaisons with winningly dry humour. This pursuit is rendered with a poet’s cadence ... the narrative steams ahead at an exhilarating pace ... [Kandasamy's] is exactly the sort of voice the Indian far right seeks to silence. But to restrict her autopsy of violence to the Asia shelf of bookstores would be misleading. Its beating heart is a universally recognised quest for freedom and meaning in a world where women are still shockingly undervalued. There is sex; there are — surprisingly — laughs. There is a narrator more than capable of taking on the patriarchy. In the Shonda Rhimes version of Kandasamy’s novel, the narrator would get away with murder.
It would be easy to ask, 'What kind of woman would allow that?' Or even, 'Why did she stay?' In 2012, when Kandasamy, a poet, translator and activist, wrote about her brief, violent marriage for the Indian magazine Outlook, these are the kinds of questions she was asked. When I Hit You is her urgent4memoir might offer; she is very clear that this is a work of fiction — of imagination, not of memory ... This book is Kandasamy’s rebuke to those who think privilege, financial or educational, protects against harm. Her characters are never named, their anonymity allowing the reader to slip easily into their skins ... Kandasamy is too skilled a writer to give us a caricature of an abusive man ... The book’s subtitle makes an ambitious nod to James Joyce, to the coming-of-age genre. Each chapter contains an epigraph by the likes of Kamala Das, Margaret Atwood, Anne Sexton, Zora Neale Hurston. These writers’ words have survived, and provided comfort, across time and cultures. And within the book, an answer — no, a warning — to the husband: Should I remind you that your wife is also a writer? And what is a writer, if not the one who gets to shape the narrative, to have the last word?
Kandasamy...writes with poetic intensity ... Yet sometimes this intensity undoes itself ... But even as she is beaten down – as, through Kandasamy’s use of stylistic devices such as repetition, are we – the narrator reflects that every moment has narrative potential. The risk of desensitisation is averted: the novel becomes a meditation on the art of writing about desire, abuse and trauma ... The book jacket evokes khadi fabric bordered in saffron, something the socially beloved figure of the 'good Indian girl' might wear. Open it, however, and a voice emerges that expresses desire, feels pain and has steely courage. It screams from its demure outerwear, refusing to be silenced in its search for love. The reader is left with the impact and implications of that, and the ideal of servile Indian femininity is in tatters at last.
My experience of reading it was that I often realized I had been tensing my legs, clenching my teeth, needing to take long, deep, calming breaths — or indeed, to remember to breathe at all ... Kandasamy effectively combines her harrowing account with sharp left hooks of humor ... It is a tragic cliché that tales of domestic abuse, told by the women who survive, are always dogged by the question 'Why didn’t she just leave?', which reveals the extent of ignorance on the issue (as well as how widespread it is ... Part of the power of When I Hit You are [the] stunning changes in tone. After all the horror, she does leave with her life, and is able to salvage her sensuality with it. The book ends with her alone, wearing lipstick purely for her own pleasure. Femininity is a steely thing.
Barely a page went by in Meena Kandasamy’s When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife without my wanting to underline at least a sentence ... Kandasamy’s prose is electric, at once brave and poetic and satirical as she pokes holes in the mythoi of marriage, gender, intellectualism, and art ... Kandasamy is unflinching in her portrayal of both domestic violence and how art can grapple with abuse.
Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction in 2018, this novel from Kandasamy ...reflects deeply and meaningfully on an unnamed woman’s marriage to an abusive man ... 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.
...powerful ... 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 ... 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 ... So long as society does not listen to women, this novel shows, no woman will truly be safe.
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.
