Abhilash Melethil's Blog: Abhilash Melethil

When someone says “László,” the first thing that comes to my mind is Sátántangó — that six-and-a-half-hour-long film, one of Béla Tarr’s greatest works. It was when he came to borrow that movie that I first met Pradeep Bhasker, a great lover of books. At that time, I was in a reading slump — I […]

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One Battle After Another is a grand-scale, darkly funny film that skewers American hypocrisy. It’s satire at its sharpest—mocking one of the world’s most powerful yet absurd countries and its chaotic political system. And yet, for all the detestation it attracts (these days even from Indian far-right voices), the U.S. has also nurtured some of […]

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How Reading Mediocre books affects thinking and writing and in turn weakening a solid foundation Malayalam literature always had

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Recently I finished reading Cixin Liu’s Death’s End. In the hardcore science fiction genre, it stands as a peak of human imagination (for imagination itself is intelligence). It’s also the conclusion of the series. The central plot is that an alien civilization tries to conquer Earth. Humanity spends centuries preparing a weapon to face them. […]

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I just finished reading Arundhati Roy’s memoir Mother Mary Comes to Me. Earlier, when I read and reviewed her novel Utmost (I’d once seen a humbug mock it), I had noted that her writing spilled over with anger and intensity. Now, in this memoir, she lists the reasons for that anger. She shows that her […]

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Arundhati Roy’s clarity is impossible to deny. I have disagreed — and at times still disagree — with some of her ideas, especially her positions on Kerala politics. My sense has been that some of those views were shaped under the influence of certain Islamic fundamentalist groups here. Another disagreement, years ago, came from my […]

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In the earlier post, I mentioned that Browne wrote out of his experience of living in Norfolk. Sebald lived in Norwich, and Naipaul in Wiltshire. Sebald’s narrator writes by blending memory with the experience of walking through Suffolk. Naipaul’s narrator does essentially the same thing, though he stays rooted in one place. Later, when I […]

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Although I had written this before, there was a time in my reading life when I avoided Rushdie and Naipaul after seeing them dismissed by Krishnan Nair (he was not really a critic but a literary journalist — which, to be fair, suits many so-called “critics” now as well). Later, however, I read two of […]

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A serious reader does not choose a book in isolation; it is always the sum of the people, times, and experiences they have passed through. That is what some online readers fail to grasp. The offline lives of people we see online—their ripenings, the choices they make, the things they embrace or abandon—cannot be known […]

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Adrian Tchaikovsky continues his prolific streak— it feels like every six months there’s something new from him. This time, it’s The Hungry Gods, set in yet another post-apocalyptic world filled with talking animals and birds. Was it as good as Shroud? For me, the answer is no. But with Tchaikovsky, there’s always something fresh to latch onto—some concept, […]

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