When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife

by Meena Kandasamy

Overview

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.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781609455996
Publisher:	Europa Editions, Incorporated
Publication date:	03/17/2020
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	326,542
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.10(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

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.

Editorial Reviews

01/27/2020

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.)

Publishers Weekly

★ “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.”—Kirkus Reviews (Starred Review)

★ “Kandasamy’s thoughtful deep dive into the nature of abuse and its effects is a call-to-action to believe and support all women.”―Booklist (Starred review)

“Explosive...Meena Kandasamy’s vivid, sharp and precise writing makes a triumph of When I Hit You.”―The Guardian

“Urgent, searing.”—The New York Times Book Review

“When I Hit You is a sharp, scalding novel that is not soon forgotten.”—ForeWord Reviews

“Kandasamy is showing us the sleight of hand in slow motion, and grinning from ear to ear as she does so.”—Los Angeles Review of Books

“Courageous and brave and disturbing and will stay with you for a long time”―Stylist

“Fierce and unforgettable”―Culturefly

“Brilliant . . . Astonishing . . . By far the best read of the year”―Women Writers

“Read it as an extended prose poem, a feminist anthem, an experiment with life. But do read it.”—The Daily O

“A searing analysis of an all-too-common predicament.”—Rebecca Rose, Financial Times

‘Best Books of 2017’ “Searing…I read it in a single sitting.”—Fatima Bhutto, author of Songs of Blood And Sword and The Shadow Of The Crescent Moon

From the Publisher

★ 2020-01-13
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 escape—her 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.

Kirkus Reviews