Abhilash Melethil's Blog: Abhilash Melethil

“School of Night” is the newest (fourth) novel in Karl Ove Knausgaard’s Morning Star series.A distinctive feature of this series is that all its books belong to the genre-fiction category. They are supernatural tales told through the perspectives of multiple characters. In The School of Night, for the first time in this series, Knausgaard presents […]

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David Szalay’s Flesh is a novel that tells the life of a man who lived entirely by “going with the flow.” It’s a book I read simply because I had nothing else to read — and finished it in the same spirit. As a schoolboy, the protagonist has a relationship with an older woman — […]

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Reading Proust has been the biggest personal project I set out to complete this year — and I finally managed to finish it on the very last day of October. Effort was never really the concern with a project like this; it was more about how to engage with such an immense text — especially one that often unfolds […]

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In Fosse’s trilogy, how is what matters. The story does not exist merely to say where it is going. László, Bernard, Murnane — all of them are about how. Hunger is how, Stoner is how. In Dostoevsky and Leo (Tolstoy), how is primary. Their where is also magnificent — especially in works like Anna Karenina […]

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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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