When I hit you - Meena Kandasamy

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. 

Paperback, 272 pages
Expected publication: March 1st 2018 by Atlantic Books
Fiction
for review

My thoughts:
I really do not know how to review this one. It is both raw, poetic and close.

We never even learn her name. It is told in first person and it is very matter of fact. A young writer falls for her professor. They both share a passion for communism. They marry and it all turns to hell. They are not married for long before she gets away, but that times shapes her. We see how he controls her more and more. Tells her what to do, what to think, what to wear. How he starts hitting her, raping her. How he even gets jealous of her thoughts.

But her thoughts are her freedom, in those she dreams herself away. In those she wonders how to escape. And she tells it like it is. People will always question why she did not do it before. It is never that easy. And it's not like society in India makes it easier either.

That is how it's raw and close. The poetic comes from her words. They are just flow in a simple way.  They just are...

This is her story. This is anyone's story. This is what the author went through.

I do like her way with words.