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 by another. That is the limitation of the judges.
I often speak about my own reading, and I do so from a deep clarity of what it means to me. To speak of one’s own journey in this way, I believe, is an act of confidence. But to assume that every reader will weigh and measure their experience and then write about it on Facebook is sheer foolishness. I don’t bother with that. At most, I drop hints here and there.
For me, Solenoid is the greatest novel of this century—and I say that purely on the basis of my own reading. The book carries echoes of everything from Kafka to McCarthy, from the classics to speculative fiction, even reflections of the author’s earlier works. More than that, when a writer creates at the height of his powers, the radiance of that writing can be recognized by anyone who has truly read at least one great book before. Moby-Dick, which I consider the greatest novel in the world, contains such sublime visions. You see it in Dostoevsky and Tolstoy as well. In truth, you don’t even need prior experience to sense that brilliance: while Dostoevsky plunges into the depths of the spiritual, Tolstoy dissolves into the very essence of ordinary humanity.
If imagination can be understood as wisdom, Solenoid is its towering summit. I am reading Proust now, with immense patience—unlike my earlier attempt. At first, I could not stand the endless talk of aristocracy and royal life, but Proust shapes three-dimensional people out of that world, peeling them bare with his veiled laughter. Yet even he is not fully original—Franz, Balzac, and many others stood as his models.
With the same patience I read Knausgaard’s six-volume series, but Solenoid demanded twice the effort. To write such books (or to have any of the writers mentioned here) in a language as young and resource-limited as Malayalam is impossible; the cultural maturity, depth, and expansiveness needed for it simply don’t exist here. One must remember that modern Malayalam has not yet produced a novel surpassing Khasak—a fact that has stood unchanged for nearly sixty years. Recognizing one’s limitations is the first step toward growth. But some resist this acceptance, preferring instead to glorify the past; and really, how different is that from the mindset of neo-Nazis?
When I think of how much of my online life I wasted debating with such fools, I myself am astonished. Reading is a wondrous act. It may be easy to say “read more, widen your horizons,” but in reality it requires a willingness to embrace another culture of reading, thinking, philosophy, and intellectual life; a mental openness; and readiness to experience it deeply.
Distinctions of quality and gradation are part of it. Mixing everything together is not the goal. Yet experiences can still be shared across those boundaries. To reduce all this to “colonial” or “westernized”, like some people do, is another form of intellectual cowardice—or worse, the cowardice of those who thrive on mediocrity. That is why even the Nazis were unwilling to mix. And that, too, is difficult for many to truly understand.