More about the book
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.
Book purchase
When I Hit You, Meena Kandasamy
- Language
- Released
- 2017
- Binding
- (Hardcover)
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- Title
- When I Hit You
- Subtitle
- Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife
- Language
- English
- Authors
- Meena Kandasamy
- Publisher
- Atlantic Books
- Released
- 2017
- Format
- Hardcover
- Pages
- 249
- ISBN10
- 1786491265
- ISBN13
- 9781786491268
- Series
- Tags
- Fiction, Women, Contemporary Fiction, Feminism, India
- Rating
- 4.1 out of 5
- Description
- 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.