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.

A Thousand Miles to Freedom: My Escape from North Korea by Eunsun Kim, Sébastien Falletti, David Tian

Eunsun Kim was born in North Korea, one of the most secretive and oppressive countries in the modern world. As a child Eunsun loved her country…despite her school field trips to public executions, daily self-criticism sessions, and the increasing gnaw of hunger as the country-wide famine escalated.

By the time she was eleven years old, Eunsun's father and grandparents had died of starvation, and Eunsun too was in danger of starving. Finally, her mother decided to escape North Korea with Eunsun and her sister, not knowing that they were embarking on a journey that would take them nine long years to complete. Before finally reaching South Korea and freedom, Eunsun and her family would live homeless, fall into the hands of Chinese human traffickers, survive a North Korean labor camp, and cross the deserts of Mongolia on foot.

Now, in A Thousand Miles to Freedom, Eunsun is sharing her remarkable story to give voice to the tens of millions of North Koreans still suffering in silence. Told with grace and courage, her memoir is a riveting exposé of North Korea's totalitarian regime and, ultimately, a testament to the strength and resilience of the human spirit. 

My thoughts:

Now and then I read a memoir. I have read some good ones, I could not put down Malika Oufkir's book, Wild Swans moved me, and Leaving Mother Lake was so interesting. While this book failed in that aspect, it was the simplicity of the book. It was just too simple for what it was about.

I wanted more horror, misery. Ok so that might sound bad, but I just expected more from a book about North Korea. But then the book was not really about North Korea, it was about trying to survive in China.

I was told about starvation and how relatives and friends died left and right. Yes that is horrible, but that was the only horrific part she ever knew. I learned they were given 1 kg of candy on their glorious leader's birthday and how the capital was the most wonderful place ever. But then she could not tell me about prisons, work camps and executions cos she only knew a good life, the starvation and then China. In that aspect I was not really moved by her tale. A simple YA like tale. Where things were mentioned that we had already been told before. I also did not like how she totally dissed Mongolia and how they lived there. So that is worse than North Korea then?

So do not expect to learn more about North Korea. Maybe she was not critical of NA enough for me.

Conclusion:

BUT, it was still a good and short book. Interesting in those early NA parts and later the China parts that made me angry. They are just throwing them back into that hell.

Hardcover, 220 pages
Published August 15th 2014 by Libris förlag (first published March 8th 2012)
Memoir
Library