When I Hit You

January 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.

Starred review from February 1, 2020
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.

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Starred review from March 15, 2020
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.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2020, American Library Association.)