THE SUNDAY REVIEW | WHEN I HIT YOU – MEENA KANDASAMY

This is another of the books on this year’s Women’s Prize for Fiction long and shortlists. It’s also the one that, after watching many BookTubers review some or all of the books on the list, I felt was a front-runner to win this year’s prize (it didn’t, Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire did). I decided to pick it up, despite some initial misgivings, because of all the praise that was being heaped on it. So you could say I went into this with pretty high expectations.

In some respects, it lived up to the hype. This book is the story of a young woman who marries an older man and becomes completely isolated from her friends and professional connections as her husband slowly removes her access to the outside world. He limits her phone and internet usage, monitors her email address and forces her to delete her Facebook account. Under normal circumstances this is completely unacceptable, but given that she works as a freelance writer, this also leaves her with no way of working so that she is entirely dependent on him. The slow and insidious progression of this isolation and, indeed, of the abuse itself is chillingly well represented.

The book is loosely autobiographical – the extent of the author’s own life in the pages is up for debate. There has been talk that it is touted as fiction largely to avoid legal implications, but is more autobiographical than not. I mention this at the outset because I found it very interesting to consider how that played into her handling of the subject matter.

The first element of this novel that bears discussing is that the writing itself was, at times, absolutely beautiful. Though the overall narrative wasn’t as strong as I had hoped, line by line it was gorgeous. It is clearly written by a writer who not only selects words with great care, but plays with their interaction and meaning. It makes sense given Kandasamy’s background as a poet. She also selected some wonderful quotes to introduce parts of the novel, and those passages written by others were well placed and a sometimes startling contrast to Kandasamy’s own style. I believe this was also intentional. I tabbed and underlined so many sections, and this was, I think, my favourite element in the book.

The book jumps right into the fray – it begins after the unnamed narrator has escaped her husband and returned to her family. So we know that she makes it through. There is then the briefest of introductions to the character – we learn that she was somewhat sheltered, left home to pursue an education, had some unfortunate relationships, and then met and quickly married her husband. We see a girl who is a bit flippant, naive and impulsive. She isn’t particularly likable or sympathetic, which serves later on in the novel to underline one of the realities of abuse – that it doesn’t always happen to saints or demure subservient housewives. It can happen to feminists. It can happen to self obsessed silly women. It can happen to people that, in any other context, we might be tempted to write off as not worth our consideration. Abuse can happen to anyone, and regardless of what we may think of its victims as people, they are deserving our our empathy and help if we are in a position to offer it. It transcends stereotypes, and those stereotypes of the battered wife can be harmful.

Another deeply affecting aspect of the novel is how the people in the narrator’s life react (or don’t) to her predicament. Her parents are the only ones she tells, and their woefully inadequate response is to make excuses for her husband’s inexcusable behaviour and offer advice on how she, the victim of physical violence and emotional abuse, can manage the situation better to prevent her husband from beating her. Her friends assume they’re not hearing from her because she’s too busy, they have no idea what is going on and don’t even consider that anything might be amiss because they see her as a strong feminist. I found this to be, in some ways, even more shocking than the abuse since I went into the novel expecting that.

The narrator’s own response to the abuse is also not what you would expect. The abuse is presented in a distanced, analytical way. She often discusses events by musing about how she would write them in a hazy future context – would she present them as a poem (which she does at various points)? Would she present it in an article? This aloofness read as a coping mechanism, a way that she managed to survive her abuse and find the strength to imagine a future, one where she was looking back on this as history and telling her story. I understand how this could, for some readers, be very effective. But it could (as it did in my case) go the other way. Between this narration style and the lack of introduction and building of sympathy with the narrator at the beginning, I felt so distanced that I had a really hard time connecting emotionally with her plight. Kandasamy’s choice to create this detached, removed narrator had a cost, and this was it. I felt very emotionally disconnected, to the point where I felt myself pushing to continue reading because I didn’t really care much about what was happening. I knew she was going to survive and escape her husband, and I knew going in what was going to happen to her before she did, so I needed that emotional payoff to connect to the story and it wasn’t anywhere to be found.

It’s hard for me to rate this as it’s yet another book that is vital in content, and that presents its themes in a new and interesting way. While it isn’t a book I’ll be looking back on at the end of the year as a standout, it is one I think should be read widely and that I’d recommend picking up if you have any interest in the subject, enjoy writing with a distinctly poetic flavour or want to challenge your assumptions about domestic violence. I do think it’s an important book, if not an overly affecting or favourite one for me. And do bear in mind that while I had a significant lack of emotional response to this book, most other reviewers had the opposite reaction. Some even reported significant use of Kleenex. So it could just be me.

If you’ve read this book, what did you think? Did you have any of the same issues with it that I did? Did you feel that it was effective as an account of domestic violence? What other critiques do you have of the novel? I’d love to discuss it in the comments!

Seduced by politics and poetry, the unnamed narrator falls in love with a university professor and agrees to be his wife, but what for her is a contract of love is for him a contract of ownership. As he sets about reducing her to his idealised version of a kept woman, bullying her out of her life as an academic and writer in the process, she attempts to push back – a resistance he resolves to break with violence and rape.

Smart, fierce and courageous When I Hit You is a dissection of what love meant, means and will come to mean when trust is undermined by violence; a brilliant, throat-tightening feminist discourse on battered faces and bruised male egos; and a scathing portrait of traditional wedlock in modern India. – Goodreads

Book Title: When I Hit You
Author: Meena Kandasamy
Series: No
Edition: Paperback
Published By: Atlantic Books
Released: March 1, 2018 ( First published May 4, 2017)
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 272
Date Read: April 23-May 15, 2018
Rating: 6/10
Average Goodreads Rating: 4.16/5 (1,110 ratings)