Exploring the idea of rejection

THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Moving away from the measured style of the historical novel ‘Rani’ to the fast-paced idiom of popular novels was difficult, said author Jaishree Misra, at the launch of her new book, ‘A Scandalous Secret’. She also read out from the book and took questions from the audience, who had gathered for the launch at the DC Books showroom at Statue Junction in the city on Wednesday evening. “It was more difficult getting into the style of writing in ‘Rani’,” Misra clarified."Having always written popular fiction, I had to deliberately keep the modern idiom at bay. I was constantly slipping in and out of it before finally falling into the language that a historical novel demanded. But, after ‘Rani’, it was also difficult to come back to the pacier idiom of these three popular novels,” she said, referring to the three titles released as part of her three-book contract with Avon, the commercial fiction imprint of Harper Collins, UK. ‘A Scandalous Secret’ is the last in the series, the first two being ‘Secrets and Lies’ and ‘Secrets and Sins’. Misra said that the book, that deals with the story of a daughter who comes in search of her biological mother, who had given her away as an infant, was born out of her ambition to explore the idea of rejection. She contrasted it with her best-selling first book ‘Ancient Promises’, which had experimented with love and bonding between mothers and daughters. Critic and academician A G Oleena, who introduced the book to the audience, said that it dealt with the complexities that haunt urban life in India. “While each character in the novel is a study on their real-life counterparts in modern India, it also reminds us of the experimental themes of writers like K Sasraswathy Amma and Kamala Das,” she said.“The transparent and extremely light language of the novel poses a discourse in the literary scene that seeks to portray the superficial nature of modern urban life,” she said. The book was released by former Vice-Chancellor G Balamohan Thampi. Misra’s book was a proof of how the mistakes that happens in other people’s lives are treated as scandals, he said. Though he is not used to the Page 3 life she portrays in the book, the problems in their lives are as human as those in the lives of the common people, Thampi said.