Exquisite Cadavers | The Writes of Womxn

At the end of 2019, I challenged myself to read 100 books from my own shelves. What I meant by from my own shelves were the books that had been sitting there some time, often for years. I was fed up of not getting to books that I knew I wanted to read because there was always something shiny and new in front of me. The pandemic helped, of course; losing most of your work and being forced to stay at home will do that. I finished the 100 in early December. Here are the ones I really really loved.

The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake – Aimee Bender (Windmill)

I thought this would be twee, I was so wrong. The story of a girl who realises she can taste people’s emotions; the story of her brother who begins to disappear. It’s about trauma and depression and it’s perfect.

The Western Wind – Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape)

A Brexit allegory disguised as a Medieval whodunnit. Utterly compelling.

Fleishman Is in Trouble – Taffy Brodesser-Akner (Wildfire)

A soon-to-be-ex-wife and mother disappears. A terrible soon-to-be-ex-husband who thinks he’s great has his story narrated by his ‘crazy’ friend. A piercing look at heterosexual marriage and a send-up of the Great American Novel. Longer review here.

Things we lost in the fire – Mariana Enriquez (translated by Megan McDowell) (Granta)

Dark, dark, dark stories. So haunting, so brilliant.

Exquisite Cadavers – Meena Kandasamy (Atlantic)

A Oulipo style novella showing how fiction can be created from life, but it isn’t the same thing. Longer review here.

Ongoingness: The End of a Diary – Sarah Manguso (Graywolf Press)

Manguso wrote a daily diary until she had her first child. This is full of ideas of letting go which are so brilliant I copied many of them on to Post-Its and stuck them above my desk. It’s published by Picador in the UK.

we are never meeting in real life – Samantha Irby (Faber)

Irby is my discovery of the year. Her essays are laugh-out-loud funny and entertaining but they are also about her life as a working class, disabled Black woman with a traumatic childhood. Revolutionary.

Heartburn – Nora Ephron (Virago)

Funny; good on cooking and marriage. Devastating final chapter.

Fingersmith – Sarah Waters (Virago)

Clever crime novel about class, the art of theft and pornography. Superb structure. A masterpiece.

The Chronology of Water – Lidia Yuknavitch (Canongate)

Yuknavitch’s non-chronological memoir about the fifteen lives she has lived. It’s about dying (metaphorically), swimming (literally and metaphorically) and living (literally). It fizzes.

Bear – Marian Engel (Pandora)

The headline is this is a book about a woman who has sex with a bear. It’s really about female autonomy. It’s being republished in the UK in 2021 by Daunt Books.

Magic for Beginners – Kelly Link (Harper Perennial)

Kelly Link is a genius. These stories are so rich in detail; she takes you from a situation that seems perfectly normal to a wild, subverted world that also seems perfectly normal. Incredible.

Parable of the Talents – Octavia E. Butler (Headline)

The novel that predicted a president who would aim to ‘Make America Great Again’. It’s as much the story of a mother / daughter relationship formed under significant trauma as it is the story of a country at war with itself. Longer review here.

Copies of The Particular Sadness of Lemon Cake, Fleishman is in Trouble, Exquisite Cadavers, we are never meeting in real life, The Chronology of Water and Parable of the Talents were courtesy of the publishers as listed. All others are my own copies.

Meena Kandasamy’s second novel When I Hit You was a huge success; shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction and the Jhalak Prize, longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize, and acclaimed as a Book of the Year by numerous publications. A work of auto-fiction, it was repeatedly described by reviewers as a memoir. As Kandasamy writes in the preface of Exquisite Cadavers:

…some reviewers were side-stepping the entire artistic edifice on which the work stood, and were instead solely defining me by my experience: raped Indian woman, beaten-up wife. I felt annoyed in the beginning and later angered that as a woman writer I was not even given the autonomy of deciding the genre to which the book I had spent years writing, belonged.

Exquisite Cadavers is Kandasamy’s response. Taking the title from the game of chance, she set out to write an Oulipo style work in which she writes a story about a couple far removed from her own situation and confines herself to the margins.

The main story concerns Karim and Maya, a young couple who live in London. He is a film student whose ideas are constantly being knocked back by the research committee who think he should be creating something around his own identity. She is white-passing and has to deal with microaggressions from her family and colleagues about her marriage. However, the story is centred on their relationship; the way they perceive each other and their roles.

Early on in the marginalia Kandasamy writes If everything goes to plan, there will be no seepage, no bleeding from her own life into those of Karim and Maya. This proves impossible though as concerns about Brexit, the Prevent Strategy, and the fates of Indian activists appear in the fictional narrative.

Part of what’s really interesting about the book is making the links between the two stories; seeing how life is reconstituted in art. Although, technically, Kandasamy fails in her intention to create an entirely separate fictional story, what she does achieve demonstrates to those who failed to recognise the artistry in When I Hit You that events and ideas can be taken and sculpted into something new, something rooted in fiction.

Again, early on in the marginalia Kandasamy says:

No one discusses process with us. [Writers ‘from a place where horrible things happen [… / ] have happened to us’.]

No one discusses our work in the framework of the novel as an evolving form.

No one treats us as writers, only as diarists who survived.

With Exquisite Cadavers Kandasamy has forced that conversation to the forefront through an intriguing and deftly executed piece of work.

Exquisite Cadavers is published by Atlantic Books. Thanks to the publisher for my review copy.