“Fiction, imaginative work that is, is not dropped like a pebble upon the ground, as science may be; fiction is like a spider’s web, attached ever so lightly perhaps, but still attached to life at all four corners. Often the attachment is scarely perceptible…But when the web is pulled askew, hooked up at the edge, torn in the middle, one remembers that these webs are not spun in midair by incorporeal creatures, but are the work of suffering human beings, and are attached to grossly material things, like health and money and the houses we live in.”

Virginia Woolf

Meena Kandasamy (2017) When I Hit You. London, Atlantic Books. 978-1-78649-128-2

 

When I Hit You is set in southern India – between Chennai, Kerala and Mangalore and is a fictionalised account of the brutally abusive four-month marriage the author experienced shortly after leaving college

 
[Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence and Abuse; Rape]
 
[Spoiler alert]
 
The novel travels back and forwards in time to detail the main character’s life as a woman in society where the expectations of her are clearly set out, both by her family and society around her.
 
Having left home to study in neighbouring state, she returns to her family home to nurse a broken heart. Under some pressure to marry, the writer meets and falls in love with a university lecturer who describes a past as a revolutionary communist – and we are never entirely sure if his tales are true or fantasy. He takes up a lectureship in a coastal town where she accompanies him, intending to keep writing.
 
Once isolated geographically from her friends and family, he then isolates her further by taking over her on-line presence, deleting her emails and contacts and limiting her time on the internet. She is ground down physically and emotionally as he gas-lights and manipulates her until the abuse turns more and more violent as he attempts to break her spirit completely.
 
Finally, as the violence escalates, she is able to escape and return to her parents who now use the story of her degradation (she came back with lice in her hair, dirty and unkempt) to justify supporting her against the shame society would choose to identify her.
 
The mental manipulation is really well described and I found myself identifying with the actions in this book, despite the brutality of her experience and the setting in a different cultural milieu.
 
Awards:

• Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018

• Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2018

• Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2018

• A Guardian Book of the Year

• A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year

• An Observer Book of the Year

• A Financial Times Book of the Year   

 I prefer, 

where truth is important, 

to write fiction. 

                                                                                                                 Virginia Woolf