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Meena Kandasamy, Exquisite Cadavers, Simon & Schuster India, 2025. 112 pgs.

Borrowed from the French term cadavre exquis—a technique devised by the Surrealists to produce collective, chance-based creations—the title gestures toward a literary tradition that privileges fragmentation, juxtaposition, and the embrace of aleatory aesthetics. The method itself originates in an old parlour game, Consequences, wherein participants contribute sequentially to a drawing or text, each unaware of the preceding parts. What emerges is a strange, disjointed figure: a creation born of both discontinuity and an uncanny, invisible coherence. It is this principle of formal fragmentation and speculative thinking that Meena Kandasamy both inherits and subverts.

Exquisite Cadavers unfolds across two distinct textual planes. The right-hand pages narrate the fictional, stylised story of Karim and Maya. The left-hand pages—printed in a smaller font and marginally positioned—contain notes, autobiographical fragments, political commentary, and reflections on the act of writing itself. The interplay between these two narrative strands—fictional narrative and self-reflexive marginalia—produces a hybrid space that is neither wholly novel nor memoir, but something closer to aesthetic experiment. The novel thus wears its constructedness on its sleeve, compelling the reader to remain acutely aware of form and authorship.

At the heart of Exquisite Cadavers lies a rebuttal to the reductive reception of Meena Kandasamy’s earlier novel, When I Hit You—a work that drew directly from her own experiences of domestic abuse. Following its publication, Kandasamy observed with some exasperation that many readers and critics collapsed the boundary between art and autobiography. The novel, rather than being read as a complex literary construction, was relegated to the realm of memoir.

This misreading is precisely what Exquisite Cadavers seeks to resist. The novel is born, as Kandasamy herself notes, from a desire to write “a story as far removed from my own as possible.”

Kandasamy, with characteristic audacity, offers no instructions for how Exquisite Cadavers is to be read. The burden—and the pleasure—of orchestration is passed on to the reader. Does one follow the fictional narrative of Karim and Maya straight through, pausing only occasionally to glance at the marginalia? Or does one trace the left-hand notes as a running commentary, allowing them to bend, distort, or prefigure the story on the right? Or perhaps (as I attempted, in a moment of experimental overreach), one might try reading both simultaneously—a kind of narrative split-screen. In all honesty, I would not recommend this last approach unless one is content to disjoint the entire narrative. But that, of course, is precisely the point: part of the novel’s experiment lies not only in its structure, but in the mode of its reception.

The fictional narrative centres on Maya and Karim, a London-based, inter-racial, intercultural couple whose marriage—like the novel itself—is in a state of continual translation. Their personal conflicts unfold against a broader canvas of political uncertainty and social fragmentation. Kandasamy alternates perspectives, constructing a dialogic space in which issues such as Islamophobia, racism, Brexit, anti-immigrant prejudice, Hindu fundamentalism, and familial discord are not merely referenced, but absorbed into the texture of intimate life.

Yet just as this narrative begins to settle into recognisability, the marginalia intervenes: a sequence of fragmentary notes, aphorisms, memories, political observations, and literary reflections, many drawn from Kandasamy’s own life. The prose carries the quiet tension of imminent unraveling. What is presented as a home—a shared life carved out in the heart of an ostensibly cosmopolitan metropolis—is in fact a precariously assembled refuge, under constant threat from the slow violence of casual racism, economic precarity, cultural dislocation, and the exhaustion of artistic compromise. This slow erosion of domestic harmony mirrors the political erosion of inclusivity and pluralism in the broader national context. While Maya and Karim undertake the delicate work of building a shared life—one shaped by love, difference, and uneasy assimilation—the novel refuses to offer them the illusion of permanence. Their household, like their identities, remains vulnerable to external incursions and internal dissonances.

Her marginal annotations act as counter-narratives to state power—quietly, and at times furiously, posing questions the central narrative merely gestures toward. Is it still a home if one must constantly justify their presence within it? The burden of answerability is placed squarely upon the reader.

The fragile shell of Maya and Karim’s shared domesticity shatters near the novel’s close, when Karim’s brother, Youssef, is arrested on trumped-up charges of terrorism. The story does not conclude in any conventional sense; rather, the novel presents four alternative endings, leaving resolution suspended and the future unclaimed. It falls to the reader—now implicated as co-creator—to choose a trajectory, to propel the narrative forward like a participant in cadavre exquis, the Surrealist game of consequences that lends the novel both its title and its animating philosophy.

The dissolution of Maya and Karim’s seemingly stable home is mirrored by the novel’s own formal unravelling. The marginalia that has guided us through much of the text fall silent. The narrative is now carried forward solely by the fictional pair—yet we can no longer read them in the same way. By this point, we know too much: too much about the politics behind their construction, too much about the fragments, too much about the constraints under which art is produced by those burdened with being “representative” figures.

This is not, finally, a novel that seeks to provide answers.

How to cite: Singh, Ananya. “Fragments Toward a Whole: Meena Kandasamy’s Exquisite Cadavers.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 11 Jun. 2025, chajournal.blog/2025/07/11/exquisite.

Ananya Singh is a writer. Her work has been published in FirstPost, Deccan Herald, Madras Courier, and elsewhere. She can be contacted via ananyadhiraj7@gmail.com and @anannnya_s on Instagram and X. [Read all contributions by Ananya Singh.]

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