Exquisite Cadavers' experiment delivers a book that is slyly funny and profoundly thoughtful. It is common for critics and readers to belittle women by assuming they write out of catharsis rather than to create. Exquisite Cadavers is not just a fierce rebuttal. It's a work of brilliance.

Rebecca Watson, Financial Times

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Only in her mid-30s, Meena Kandasamy is building a spiky, angular, fiercely singular corpus. In fewer than 150 pages, Kandasamy shows us what it is to forge a worldview and moral philosophy as if from thin air, or rather from the act of reading and committing words to the page.

India Today

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Bold, inventive. . . An excellent exercise in form and a deeply evocative love story.

Publishers Weekly

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The key question about Exquisite Cadavers, however, is does all of this work? 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. 

The Irish Times

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This spiky, argumentative book is the novel as protest, as polemic, as dark comedy, as game.

Aida Edemariam, Guardian​

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As in When I Hit You, a cinematic, Bergerian self-regard permeates the text. She is showing us the sleight of hand in slow motion, and grinning from ear to ear as she does so. Exquisite Cadavers is a backflipping rebuke to the nexus of culture- and capital-making which would seek to backhandedly praise her bravery over her craft, and thereby keep her pushed to the sidelines. It is a joy.  

Stephanie Sy-Quia, Los Angeles Review of Books
 

Fascinating... The cleverness of Kandasamy's bricolage is that it allows her to explicitly separate fiction and memoir, while ensuring they're intimately intertwined.

Guardian

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A novel that simultaneously constructs and deconstructs itself, questioning and demonstrating the mechanisms of control. Kandasamy creates a wonderfully destructive text, its beauty manifest in its collapse.
The Columbia Review

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The result is memorable, even mischievous, as the real and fictional stories separate like oil and water.

Supriya Nair, Mumbai Mirror

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Other than Italo Calvino I cannot recall such a device delivered with such masterful ease as Exquisite Cadavers. The first thing that strikes you with Kandasamy, if you have not read her before, is that she a feather-light touch and yet complete control of her words. 

The Asian Age

 

Kandasamy achieves the unachievable in this genre-defying, brilliant and satisfying double narrative. She subverts the mainstream by inserting her self into the margins of this timely novella. In doing so, she adds depth and intensity to an already gripping story of a mixed-race millennial couple grappling with identity, unexpected parenthood, zero-hour contracts and nearsightedness within academia. There is nothing Kandasamy can't do.

Zeba Talkhani, author of My Past is A Foreign Country

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A rich and absorbing text full of allusion... Kandasamy's work becomes more bold and exciting with each new book.

The Skinny

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An extraordinary formally-inventive, beautiful at sentence-level novella.
Belfast Telegraph

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The way Kandasamy uses this text on the margins as metafictional foil puts Exquisite Cadavers in a small club of novels where typographic/page-setting idiosyncrasies are crucial to the way the text functions. Kandasamy’s strategic usage of the text on the margins are witty, sometimes laugh-out-loud deconstructions of the circumstances behind the writing of each chapter — to extend the book’s cinematic metaphor, it’s a split-screen film where one of the screens is a perpetual behind-the-scenes commentary.

Aditya Mani Jha, Hindu Business Line

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