The Paris surrealists gave the name “exquisite corpse” to the game of consequences, where one person draws part of a body, folds the paper, and passes it on, so that when unfolded, it reveals one stitched-together creature. Meena Kandasamy’s slim, inventive book plays on this technique. Each page is divided into two columns. On the right, a story unfolds about a London couple: Maya, who is English, and Tunisian film-maker Karim. On the left, Kandasamy comments on her creative process, her own life, and – increasingly – documents political horrors occurring in her native India.
Maya and Karim watch films, fight and discuss their awful fathers. Their portion is a tight close-up of a relationship, exposing every flaw. Kandasamy is also a poet, and it shows in some brilliantly distilled writing. But as they have only half the 100 pages, they remain elusive.
Their narrative acquires weight from the annotations, which document Kandasamy’s struggle watching political events from afar, seeing friends killed and arrested. She grew up in Tamil Nadu and became a leftwing activist, but now lives in London. Kandasamy worries about absenting herself from the fight and the inadequacy of fiction: “My concerns and my solidarity align with the oppressed and the exploited. And yet, creating art under capitalism, I sit here, playing with form, with format, with fonts.” She craves the “refuge” fiction can provide, but recognises the need to bear witness to reality.
Exquisite Cadavers does both: its domestic story is an escape, while its rage-filled notes are a work of consciousness-raising. Kandasamy details rapes of young girls; she lists the many forms of opposition that get people murdered in India.
At the end of the novel, the two parts silently unite. Karim returns to Tunis to help his brother, wrongfully detained, and Maya feels an impulse to join him, to look beyond the narrow confines of relationship and home. This portion is unadorned: Kandasamy’s notes stop, as if she’s decided even her fictional creations must confront political injustice.
Kandasamy explains in a preface where the dual structure came from. Her last novel, When I Hit You, drew on her experience in an abusive marriage – but she was angered by reviewers calling it “memoir”. So she tried writing “a story as removed from my own as possible” but where every influence “would be referenced and documented”.
The fictional narrative doesn’t seem that removed, really. Maya and Karim are still a young artsy educated London couple. Karim may be a film-maker but Kandasamy stingingly shows he’s expected to tell certain stories – just like the immigrant novelist. Kandasamy even acknowledges the urge to feed herself into Maya, when she – a young mother – makes her character pregnant: “I cannot make her me. Then again, I cannot relate to her if I do not share anything with her.”
This does not mean Exquisite Cadavers is a failed experiment – it’s a fascinating one, and we get to witness the author working it out on the page. The cleverness of Kandasamy’s bricolage is that it allows her to explicitly separate fiction and memoir, while ensuring they’re intimately intertwined.
This review is from the Observer
• Exquisite Cadavers by Meena Kandasamy is published by Atlantic Books (£5.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £15, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99
