The 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction Longlist

Trevor printed the announced long list for 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction and asked if any readers had read any of the titles and what they thought of them.

I have just read, “When I Hit You: Or, A Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife” by Meena Kandasamy.  While reading this book a two line dialogue from an India television series popped into my mind.

(She) “You know most women would rather be men.”

(He) “Yeah, and most men would rather not be women.”

An unidentified woman writer living in India writes the brutal and sometimes vulgar details of how her months old marriage to a handsome revolutionary leftist college lecturer deteriorates into a horror.

One thinks, “Oh this book seems such an over the top extreme, surely I’ll not read it.  Thank you very much.”

Men are left out of the discussion of this book because they are found guilty by physical anatomy.  Primitive attitudes toward women seem lodged in the brains of every man where wives are always the “at your service” slaves of their husband’s needfulness.

It does not matter how progressive and compassionate the husband might seem to the general population outside the marriage.  He will always revert to the tyrannical primal viewpoint concerning everything his wife or his  lover must say and do.

This book leaves out the middle class viewpoint that though there are alpha males who abuse women in relationships, that the majority of husbands feel their wife/partner’s life and accomplishments are as important as their own and that they share the responsibilities of marriage and are mostly at the service of one another.

Yet there are troubling exceptions.  Virginia Woolf allegedly wrote in “To The Lighthouse” about how her father’s needfulness destroyed her mother’s life.  She became acutely aware of how any woman in any marriage could face the peril of being victimized by a man who one day finds himself way more important than her.

Kandasamy shows how the petty details in the life of a marriage can be insidiously turned against the wife or the woman or the lover.

Such a theme might seem opportunistic except that there is the “me too” movement.  And there is the good marriage, the difficult marriage or the totally unendurable unsustainable marriage that train wrecks in 6 months or less or sooner.

In a way this book defends or more clearly explains some of what underlies the feminist themes in the writing of Virginia Woolf and the poetry of Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton.

You’d think such a book would stridently stray from reality into some angry woman’s self-serving dark fantasy.

But quite the opposite occurs.  It seems firmly grounded in actual occurrence and it presents hidden not very much talked about or not very universally understood facts that most people would rather not look at.

This book is well worth reading because it chronicles an extreme.  But it is an extreme that truely exists where a man’s attitude toward virtually everything in his marriage or relationship can become filtered through the primal urges of his male anatomy.

I hope this book makes it to the short list for the 2018 Women’s Prize for Fiction.  In these times of extreme polarity viewpoints on almost everything including marriage and relationships, every man and woman might benefit from having a good look at what might have influenced what has been going on recently and maybe what has been happening from way much longer back.