Exquisite Cadavers: A surprising, gripping experiment that works

Exquisite Cadavers

Author: Meena Kandasamy

ISBN-13: 9781786499653

Publisher: Atlantic Books

Guideline Price: £5.99

The publication of this book raises a number of questions. To answer the first, for those who haven’t come across her writing before, Meena Kandasamy is one of the rising stars of contemporary literature.

Born in India and based in London, she writes poetry and fiction that combines political awareness (her first collection of poems was titled Ms Militancy) with innovation in form and structure. That blend puts her in good company with the likes of Ali Smith, though where Smith tends to soften her message with puns and jokes, Kandasamy looks the reader directly in the eye.

The second question from the browser picking up this slim, strange-looking book is: what is it? It seems too short to be a novel –100 pages end to end – and each page has two columns of text.

The explanation is given in Kandasamy’s preface: it began as a response to her last novel, the Women’s Prize-shortlisted When I Hit You – or rather to the critical reaction to it. That novel was a highly convincing story of a woman in an abusive marriage, and although it was based on Kandasamy’s own experiences, the book was a superbly controlled work of art in its own right.

“The artist in me,” she wrote, “was defining an experience for an audience.” However, many reviews of the book described it simply as a memoir: “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.”

The result is Exquisite Cadavers. The title comes from the surrealist parlour game where different people contribute parts to a story or drawing, without seeing what the previous person has contributed.

Kandasamy’s desire, to thwart critics seeking to read the book as autobiography again, was to “write a novel based on a story as removed from my own as possible”. But also, to display its distance from life, she has recorded “each influence, each linchpin behind every freewheeling plot turn”. That gives us the book’s distinctive appearance: the main story is written in the body of the page, and the margins are crammed with small text detailing the inspiration.

Page margins

The story is about a couple, Karim and Maya; Karim is a filmmaker, while Maya has a zero-hours contract as a layout artist “at a liberal newspaper”. The page margins tell us that Kandasamy based them on a couple who made a short film she saw in a museum in Glasgow.

Karim, attending film school, finds himself repeatedly bashing his head against well-meaning but limiting demands on how he should work. He “is told that a project embracing and interrogating his identity is encouraged”.

He is from North Africa, but when he jokingly proposes a dissertation on the camel in cinema, it “is embraced with such an earnestness that it breaks him to summon the courage to say that he was merely being sarcastic”. Sarcasm and mockery, of course, “are the preserve of equals – someone like him will always be taken only at face value”.

This is directly reflective of Kandasamy’s own experience with When I Hit You. She doesn’t pull punches: for Karim, critics lend his work “their white-white seal of approval so that he, animal-hearted African, desert-stranded Arabian in their eyes, can be let loose into the world.”

But the driver of the story is not only Karim’s work but his relationship with Maya, which suffers stresses from both within and without. The Britons they live among want to know if Karim is making Maya wear “what they euphemistically, multiculturally call ‘modest clothes’”.

This “pious horror of a secular people” drives Maya to flaunt their closeness. “She elects to walk with deliberate pride: she takes his hand in hers, she perfects that adoring gaze” – even though their relationship is, in fact, struggling.

Meanwhile, the marginalia explores what is going through Kandasamy’s mind as she is writing the book – because a story does not come just from the conscious mind, but from all of life’s background noise too.

Peculiar poetry

The signals she picks up range from sociopolitical (her father’s history, news about “IS bride” Shamima Begum) to cultural: in one section, seeking inspiration for her story about troubled marriage, she searches the BFI catalogue for films with “husband” in the title, and the results scrolling down the page margins creates a peculiar poetry.

The key question about Exquisite Cadavers, however, is does all of this work? Does it show, as Kandasamy quotes Derrida saying, that “literature is the most interesting thing in the world, maybe more interesting than the world”?

That is the hardest question to answer, because the terms are that it should be an experiment – there has never been a book quite like this. Better to ask, then, whether it surprises, grips, makes the reader take notice – all those things literature is supposed to do – to which the answer is, easily, yes, yes, and yes again.