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A review by spilledinksanket
When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife by Meena Kandasamy
5.0
When I hit you is a brutal, devastating tale about a young wife. It is a claustrophobic and terrifying read about domestic violence, marital rape and how all of us are in one way or another complicit with the act. I picked the book up after it got shortlisted for the @womensprize but kept postponing the read because of the difficult content . Fending of the mental devastation of cancer was all I had the courage for at that point.
But when I did pick it up it changed me. The book takes hold of your gut and wrenches it every now and then. You are never too far from it. The writing when it needs to reflect the obvious talents of Meena. There is flowing nature almost like poetry to her writing. In other places it conveys very effectively the narrator's absolute helplessness even as she stages her fightbacks , her small victories.
At one point in the novel Meena K. says the job of a writer is to "control the narrative". And she does that with all the dexterity of a surgeon. Picking at things that needs to be picked at, cutting off malignancies and letting the blood flow when it comes to that.
But when I did pick it up it changed me. The book takes hold of your gut and wrenches it every now and then. You are never too far from it. The writing when it needs to reflect the obvious talents of Meena. There is flowing nature almost like poetry to her writing. In other places it conveys very effectively the narrator's absolute helplessness even as she stages her fightbacks , her small victories.
At one point in the novel Meena K. says the job of a writer is to "control the narrative". And she does that with all the dexterity of a surgeon. Picking at things that needs to be picked at, cutting off malignancies and letting the blood flow when it comes to that.