KLIBF: S. Hareesh on latest work Pattunoolpuzhu, its dissimilarities with his debut Meesha

Whichever venue writer S. Hareesh speaks in, an inevitable question from the audience will be related to the right wing backlash that followed the release of his remarkable first novel Meesha. The writer has rarely replied directly, pointing gently at the unfairness of cherry-picking one line from a vast narrative to attack him. On Friday, on the third day of the 4th Kerala Legislature International Book Festival (KLIBF), he spoke without any rancour as he narrated the story of one of the persons who directed abusive comments at him during that period.

“The floods of 2018 happened a few days after the controversy erupted. As a government employee, I had the responsibility of running a relief camp and I couldn’t switch off my phone. One person kept calling to shower abuses on me. After a few calls, I warned him about a police complaint, but he persisted. I filed a complaint, he was arrested and I forgot about the matter. Years later, I was summoned to the Court to provide my statement, which was when I met him for the first time. He turned out to be a harmless guy, who had in a drunken stupor called a number that someone else had given him. The case was settled amicably. When my latest book Pattunoolpuzhu was released, he bought the book and sent me a photo. So, I gained a new reader,” he said.

Mr. Hareesh said that he dealt mostly in wide shots in Meesha and even in his second novel August 17, the distance making it easier for us to laugh at the characters’ foibles, while in his latest work, Pattunoolpuzhu, he has used close shots, where we have a better understanding of why they are so, making the laughs hard to come by.

He said Pattunoolpuzhu is almost auto-fiction, as many of the events in the young protagonist Samsa’s life happened in his life too. Bibhutibhushan Bandyopadhyay’s Pather Panchali, the book that he read the most in his childhood, also inspired it.

“Samsa walks in the same paths that I have walked. Like him, I was an introvert in my childhood. Around six months after I wrote the novel, I realised that Samsa had similarities with Apu from Pather Panchali and that I could trace most of my characters to that book. These are the influences which happen unknowingly,” he said.

Mr. Hareesh said that Malayalam is one of the languages into which the most number of translations from world literature as well as the other regional languages has happened. This has positively influenced Malayalam literature too.

“The translations of Les Miserables (as Paavangal) and Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude have influenced the way we write. Before Marquez, our writers used shorter sentences to tell stories. Marquez showed us the technique of stringing together ideas to build complicated sentences. Our openness has thus helped our literature immensely,” he said.