I’m really interested in people’s stories, whether fiction or nonfiction, regarding hard times that they’ve come upon. I’m strangely attracted to stories about people’s accounts of tragedies – both public and personal. When I heard about ‘When I Hit You’, when listening to The High Low podcast, it seemed right up my street.

I’ve never read a novel about domestic abuse before, but I inhaled Kandasamy’s. 

The unnamed narrator begins a marriage with a communist University professor, but it soon becomes clear that he wants to own the narrator, not just marry her. His possessive behavior develops throughout the novel, starting with manipulation tactics, and then moving onto physical abuse. The novel then takes an even more sinister turn when the professor begins to rape the narrator and threaten to murder her. Though graphically shocking, this novel is important through its’ refusal to skip any of these horrific details.

The narrator seems quite removed from her situations throughout the majority of the novel. She recognises that her husband’s actions are not right, yes, but she does not take a stand against them. Instead, she attempts to distract her mind in the hope that her husband’s behavior will change. She does this in a number of ways, including writing letters to imaginary lovers (and then swiftly deleting them) in order to express her rebellion and simulate some sort of freedom over her own behaviors. This is acknowledged at the end of the novel, when she has escaped the abusive relationship, as the narrator reflexively states:

‘I am the woman sheltered within words, the one distanced into a movie running in her mind, the one asked to bear the beatings, the one who endures everything until something snaps so that fate can escape her. I am the woman conjured up to take on the life of a woman afraid of facing her own reality.’

I think the method of distancing oneself from the abuse, as a literary function, was quite striking. While reading the descriptions of the abuse, I found myself frustrated at the narrator and trying to implore her that her husband would not change – she deserved better. However, in a lot of accounts of domestic abuse that I’ve heard, it’s common for women not to recognise the full extent of their abuse and hope for change. As well as this, the mode of distancing oneself from the abuse also highlights the horror of it. Within memory, the act of writing something down instantly commodifies the memory and therefore creates a metaphorical wall between what the individual remembers, and the commodified memory. Furthermore, the writer’s style to nonchalantly discuss the abuse both downplays the abuse – enforcing the fact that the abuse isn’t so horrific anymore to the narrator – and also diminishes the distance between the narrator and the abuse through the act of writing, itself. As the narrator is a writer, it’s clear to see that perhaps writing is a coping mechanism in this way.

Despite the beforementioned lack of emotional response to the abuse, the narrator does have an extremely emotional response once her husband begins to rape her. 

‘there are no screams that are loud enough to make a husband stop. There are no screams that cannot be silenced by the shock of a tight slap. There is no organic defence that can protect against penetration. He covers himself with enough lubricant to slide past all my resistance. My legs go limp. I come apart.’

‘The shame of rape is the shame of the unspeakable. Women have found it easier to jump into fire, consume poison, blow themselves up as suicide bombers, than tell another soul about what happened. A rape is a fight you did not win. You could not win. A rape is defeat.’

‘Good women don’t have bad things happen to them – in order to be raped, I need first to be made into this caricature of a bad woman. This male psychosexual logic looks at penetration as punishment. This is the rape that disciplines, the rape that penalizes me for the life I have presumably led.’

‘This is the rape that tames, the rape that puts me on the path of being a good wife. This is the rape whose aim is to inspire regret in me. This is the rape whose aim is to make me understand that my husband can do with my body as he pleases. This is rape as ownership. This rape contains a husband’s rage against all the men who may have touched me, against all the men who may touch me, against all the men who may have desired me. This nightly rape comes with a one-point agenda: she must derive no pleasure from sex. And yet, whenever he takes me against my will, he taunts me for enjoying it. In his ironclad logic: I am a whore, so I can be raped; I let myself be raped, so I am a whore.’

I apologise for the large number of quotes included, but I couldn’t stop highlighting in this chapter. I found the prose so powerful – discussing her own psychological analysis of her own rape. This not only shows ideologies around domestic abuse, such as the ‘rape as ownership’, it also highlights the shame of rape in culture – ‘women have found it easier to jump into fire, consume poison, blow themselves up as suicide bombers, than tell another soul about what happened’. This devastating response to the narrator’s experience encompasses not just the physical and mental impacts of what happened – it encompasses the ideology beyond it. The narrator seems more open in this section, as her thought processes spill out due to her emotional response regarding this crime. 

I enjoyed this book so much, in a this-book-is-SO-important kind of way. Go read. Now.

This novel features feminism and what it means to be a woman with ambition. The novel follows a set of friends that have aged and are beginning to look back upon their lives, mostly with some regret and a lack of satisfaction – they thought that they would be more than … this.

The book explores what it feels like to be a woman in a modern-day society. The society that stresses that women must have an established career and a ‘perfect’ family life, which, as established in Caroline Criado Penez’s recent work ‘Invisible Women’, is a completely unfair expectation. All of the women within this novel place too much pressure on themselves to be the perfect friend, lover, mother, etc. As the reader, we watch the women throughout their highs and lows when battling with this.

Overall, I had greater ‘expectations’ (see what I did there) for this book plot-wise, but I was pleasantly surprised by the issues that it brought to my attention.

Thank you to Random House UK.

I was initially attracted to If I Had Your Face due to the surge in the cultural phenomenon of plastic surgery in Korea. This, in itself, raises issues around self-confidence and the individuals’ need to feel perfect. The popularity of plastic surgery in Korea is soon demonstrated within the novel to be a result of societal pressures, particularly on women, to match a certain idea of what it is to be a woman. The four main characters within this novel each struggle with the conflict of being happy yet also meeting societal ideals. 

Kyuri entertains rich businessmen in ‘salon rooms’ and feels the need to spend a large amount of her money on plastic surgery in order to attract these men. This raises the patriarchal constraints upon Korean society, as it is clear within the novel that men dictate what is considered ‘beautiful’, which is further solidified due to their attraction to Kyuri and their disdain in the sight of a woman who is not yet healed from her own plastic surgery. 

Wonna, though married, feels the increasing pressure to become a mother. This pressure is intensified due to her past with several miscarriages, leaving her to drive herself crazy in superstitious belief in the hope that this will save her unborn child. 

The other characters in the novel explore their own harsh experiences within Korean society. The novel is an enlightening look into Korean society and the struggle of every-day people occupying it. The prose is even more shocking due to the lack of emotional detail from each character within it. We are given first person narratives, yet the narratives seem to be quite descriptive and intent upon providing essential details with a lack of emotion that isn’t as often flaunted in Westernized narratives. This highlights the horrific normality of the pressures of the patriarchal society in Korea due to the lack of highly emotive responses.

Thank you to Penguin UK for the ARC.

Edward and his family board a plane to start a new life in California. The plane crashes and kills 191 people. Edward is the sole survivor of the tragedy. This book follows Edward’s recovery, physically and emotionally, which spans years of his life. 

With alternating chapters, the novel flashes back to scenes from the plane which depict different passengers from the flight. These chapters give the reader an insight into every single deceased character’s thoughts and feelings during the flight, making the characters seem shockingly and heartbreakingly real. When in an airplane, it’s not unusual to feel suspended in time whilst being miles above the ground. This feeling is forced upon the reader during the plane chapters, as the reader is suspended, hovering, within the aircraft and is forced to witness all the strikingly real narratives portrayed through each passenger.

The chapter’s following Edward in the present-day perspective are equally heartbreaking, as they show a young boy struggling with grief and survivor’s guilt, whilst also maneuvering the ordinary challenges of teenage life. The writing is faultless and becomes more sophisticated as Edward matures, thus removing the need for any explicit age indicators.

I strongly suspect that Dear Edward will be one of my favourite books of 2020 – a high claim considering the year has only just begun.

‘Some time ago, a Mr Powyss, of Moreham near Prefton, offered by public advertisement, a reward of fifty pounds for life, to any man who would undertake to live for seven years under ground, without seeing a human face; and to let his toe and finger nails grow during the whole of his confinement, together with his beard. Commodious apartments were provided under ground, with a cold bath, a chamber-organ, as many books as the occupier should desire, and provisions were to be served from Mr P’s table; on ringing a bell the recluse was also to be provided with every convenience desired. It appears that an occupier offered himself for this singular residence, who is now in the fourth year of his probation, a laboring man, who has a large family, all of whom are maintained by Mr P.’ 

– Annual Register, Chronicle, 1797 volume.

Based on a true story found by the author, the novel contains a magical ironic factor as it depicts the suggestion of a sole life without human contact yet is written in the third person and split into various perspectives. These perspectives span different lives and how they interact – the upper classes and their letter correspondences, the employer – employee relationships, male and female interactions, as well as how the upper classes interact and feel power over the lower classes in general. The power dynamics in these relationships are diminished by the multiple perspectives shown within the novel, as there is no significant weighting given to a particular character. 

The novel highlights Powyss’ own need for external stimulation through social interaction, despite his previous life as a social recluse, to some extent. The realization of Powyss need for social interaction is only discovered through the confinement of John Warlow. Warlow seems to swap places with Powyss, becoming the social recluse whilst Powyss inhabits important aspects of Warlow’s own life – in particular, taking responsibility for Warlow’s family in various ways. 

The novel is an effective, and exaggerative, exploration of social identity through the mode of inter-personal interaction.

I received a free review copy from the publisher in exchange for my honest unedited feedback – thank you Serpent’s Tail!