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The Hero of This Novel Is Dead. He’d Like to Find Out Why.

“The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida,” which won the 2022 Booker Prize, is an account of wartime Sri Lanka by the ghost of a photojournalist.

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By Randy Boyagoda

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THE SEVEN MOONS OF MAALI ALMEIDA, by Shehan Karunatilaka

A corpse serves as a surfboard on a lake full of dumped bodies. An Elvis Presley cassette is pivotal to the exposure of potential war crimes. Violent death has a silver lining: freedom from the forever traffic of Colombo. Shehan Karunatilaka’s new novel, the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize , audaciously reimagines modern Sri Lankan experience for Anglophone readers otherwise accustomed to the lyric gravitas and cosmopolitan textures of fiction by Michael Ondaatje, Michelle de Kretser, Romesh Gunesekera and, more recently, Anuk Arudpragasam. By striking contrast, and even if the title promises book-club exotica, “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” is preternaturally irreverent about the manifold brutalities in Sri Lanka during its 26-year civil war.

Karunatilaka’s first novel, “Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew,” was a smart literary entertainment, the joyfully ramshackle story of an alcoholic Sri Lankan sports journalist trying to track down a once-great, now-missing cricket star. Through the far greater and darker raucousness of his second novel, Karunatilaka details an island-wide lethality that touches all walks of life. “The one good thing you can say about a bomb,” he writes, “is that it isn’t racist or sexist or concerned about class.” He also attends to the real-time consequences for the living: sobbing parents besieging police stations about their missing children; boys and girls cowering in secret rooms controlled by very bad men; a thirsty detainee given a teacup of water by a detective who warns her not to look at his face. These images come to us through the roving eye of the novel’s eponymous narrator, Maali Almeida, who introduces himself as “Photographer. Gambler. Slut.” His self-stylings are well earned, we learn in messy, graphic abundance as he tells his life story.

He does so, incidentally, while already dead. In other words, the novel begins with its hero a few steps ahead of Gabriel García Márquez’s Col. Aureliano Buendía facing the firing squad and remembering ice. And like “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” Karunatilaka’s novel breaks with conventional modes of storytelling to reveal humanness in a strange, sprawling, tragic situation. Before going on to his eternal reward or punishment, Maali has seven nights to figure out how he died, which is to say that as a gay atheist photojournalist who worked and hustled with all sides during the conflict, and slept with men from throughout conservative Sri Lankan society, he has seven nights to figure out who killed him, and why.

Maali also uses this time to visit and try to protect his friends and lovers, though he can only do so much from the In Between — a crowded, chatty and often bureaucratic parallel dimension (and mirror version of Sri Lanka), whose parameters allow him to visit anywhere his body had been while alive. He focuses on two people — DD, the son of a government power broker and also his semi-secret, on-and-off boyfriend, and DD’s cousin Jaki, a lesbian radio announcer who plays the part of Maali’s girlfriend to give them both cover. DD and Jaki search for Maali after he goes missing one night, last seen at a dismal Colombo casino. After accepting the inevitable, they turn their attention to a hidden box of his most prized photo negatives.

In a combination that would make perfect sense to Susan Sontag, these photographs promise to be both a lasting testament to Maali’s wartime aesthetic achievements, and evidence of crimes and injustices by diverse members of the island’s viciously rivalrous groups. Intensifying the novel’s intrigues, members of these groups are also searching for the box, whether to protect themselves or to take down others. They include government officials, the separatist Tamil Tigers and their sympathizers, and also insurgent communists from the Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna party, Indian peacekeepers and international black-market arms dealers, all of whom were involved in the civil war circa 1989, when the novel is set.

Hundreds of pages of caustic narration by an unquiet journo-spirit, about personal and political events in parallel dimensions held together by the knotted-up threads of a decades-old moment in a longstanding and complicated South Asian conflict, recalls, say, hundreds of pages about a telepathic, snotty-nosed narrator telling his story as the story of modern India. Or the autobiography of a German-Polish Nazi-era dwarf who can break glass with his voice. Or a motley-crewed trans-historical and metaphysical satire of Stalin’s Soviet Union. And like Rushdie’s “Midnight’s Children,” Grass’s “Tin Drum” and Bulgakov’s “The Master and Margarita,” Karunatilaka’s book is supremely confident in its literary heterodoxy, and likewise in offering idiosyncratic particularities of ordinary Sri Lankan life well beyond the serious matters of politics, history, religion and mythology. For instance, casual references to Jim Reeves records and biscuit pudding sent me back, with Proustian indigestion, to extended-family parties in greater Toronto during the 1980s. But readers everywhere will find in such demanding specificity what we all seek from great books: the exciting if overwhelming fullness of an otherwise unknown world told on its own terms, and that frisson of unexpected identification and understanding that comes from working to stay in it.

Maali is perhaps a little too perfect a guide for liberal Western readers: a self-deprecating, salty-tongued, godless gay brown mensch killed because he is a man as committed to satisfying his gambling habit and libido as he is to transcending sectarian furies while chronicling their consequences. “I was there to witness. That is all,” he declares late in the novel, when the plot turns le Carré-grade suspenseful with a “Stranger Things” twist. Indeed, “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” offers a very palatable combination of literary-political-ethical challenges, enjoyments and validations to its readers, including a sense of timeliness.

One character observes that he’s never seen Sri Lanka in such a bad situation, only to be told “it will get worse,” a prediction borne out by both the still-controversial 2009 denouement of the war, and the country’s present-day economic and political chaos. But more trying and enduring than any of this are the novel’s passing, devastating observations of where happiness can be found amid so much wreckage and bad dealing. Chatting, Dante-style, with the spirits of suicides crowded onto the rooftop ledge of a hotel in upcountry Kandy, Maali meets “five Tiger child soldiers who were brought to Colombo for rehabilitation and interrogation” and drank poison tea instead. But, Maali assures us, with focused, flashing irony, “they love the afterlife (‘no one shouting orders at us’), and they jump off the ledge with the glee of toddlers.”

THE SEVEN MOONS OF MAALI ALMEIDA | By Shehan Karunatilaka | 388 pp. | W.W. Norton & Company | Paperback, $18.95

Randy Boyagoda is a professor of English at the University of Toronto. His most recent novel is “Dante’s Indiana.”

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clock This article was published more than  1 year ago

‘The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida’ is a Booker-winning ghost story

Seeing a big literary award go to a book you loved is satisfying but, let’s face it, a little dull. How much more exciting when a prize draws your attention to a great novel you’ve never heard about.

That’s the special service provided to most readers in the United States this year by the Booker Prize, Britain’s highest literary honor. “ Oh William! ,” by beloved American novelist Elizabeth Strout , was the bookmakers’ favorite, but at the ceremony last month in London, the judges chose “ The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida ,” by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka.

Elizabeth Strout’s ‘Oh William!’ is yet another dazzler

For months, I’d been hearing tantalizing, impossibly incongruous details about this novel, which is only now being published in the United States. It’s all true: “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” is a murder mystery and a zany comedy about military atrocities.

And it’s narrated by a dead man.

In the second person.

Such a novel doesn’t sound like it has a ghost of a chance, but Karunatilaka is used to beating the odds. Like Salman Rushdie, whose fiction clearly influenced him, Karunatilaka started in advertising. He self-published his debut novel, “ Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew ,” only to see it picked up later by Penguin (U.K.) and win the Commonwealth Prize.

“The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” followed an even more tortuous route to fame. The manuscript, then called “Devil Dance,” was shortlisted for a Sri Lankan prize in 2015. Five years later, it was published by Penguin India as “Chats With the Dead.” The positive response to “Chinaman” should have opened every door, but international publishers balked, worried that the book’s Sri Lankan politics and mythology were too confusing for Western readers.

Finally, a small publisher in London called Sort of Books agreed to take on the novel — with further revisions. Karunatilaka said in a recent interview that he spent two years “tinkering with it” to make sure “someone who knows nothing about Sri Lanka and eastern mythology” could follow the story. The result of his persistence is this weird and weirdly moving political satire that’s now finding readers around the world.

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The year 1989 has just ended when our dearly departed narrator introduces himself with a disappointing revelation:

“You wake up with the answer to the question that everyone asks. The answer is Yes, and the answer is Just Like Here But Worse. That’s all the insight you’ll ever get. So you might as well go back to sleep.”

That voice — poking you in the face with its brash cynicism — belongs to the ghost of Maali Almeida, who was, until very recently, a reckless photojournalist, a chronic gambler and an unreliable boyfriend in Colombo, Sri Lanka. Initially, the afterlife feels like an LSD trip at a poorly staffed customer return center. But once Maali gets to the front of a queue, he learns that he’s dead. To prepare his spirit for eternity with The Light, he has one week — “seven moons.”

That makes a tight schedule for Maali and a breakneck pace for readers because this is a ghost with an attitude and a lot of unfinished business. For one, Maali isn’t sure how he died, and watching goons chop up his corpse with a cleaver doesn’t provide as much clarity as you might expect. After all, in life, Maali accepted photography gigs from anybody who would pay him — government officials, foreign journalists, human rights organizations, even (possible) spies. And he freely snapped pictures of things no one wanted him to see.

“They say the truth will set you free,” Maali notes, “though in Sri Lanka the truth can land you in a cage.” Knowing how dangerous his homeland is, Maali always prided himself on his discretion, a quality perfected as a closeted gay man in a violently homophobic society. But apparently, somebody wanted to guarantee his silence.

Now, reduced to airy thinness, Maali will find justice only if he can publish a secret cache of his most incendiary pictures, “photos that will bring down governments,” he says, “photos that could stop wars.” Mixed in among his stash of erotic images is evidence of horrific crimes that the Sri Lankan military would kill to keep secret.

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As nervous publishers suspected, the context of those horrors will be obscure to anyone who didn’t follow the complicated details of Sri Lanka’s decades-long civil war, involving government officials, Tamil Tigers, Marxist militants, Indian peacekeepers and more. But Karunatilaka addresses that confusion early on by reproducing a cheeky “cheatsheet” that Maali routinely gave to clueless Western journalists to unravel his country’s deadly alphabet soup, e.g.:

“LTTE — The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam. Want a separate Tamil state. Prepared to slaughter Tamil civilians and moderates to achieve this.”

“IPKF — The Indian Peace Keeping Force. Sent by our neighbour to preserve peace. Are willing to burn villages to fulfill their mission.”

That grimly comic voice carries the imprint of Kurt Vonnegut, whom Karunatilaka calls “the genius I have robbed from the most.” In an essay for the Booker Prize Foundation, he said that Vonnegut’s ability “to view tragedy through the lens of the absurd, to blend genres and moods, and to be heart-breaking and hilarious within the space of a sentence, is the gold standard we all aspire to.”

But there’s nothing merely aspirational or derivative about “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.” Karunatilaka’s story drifts across Sri Lankan history and culture with a spirit entirely its own. As his last week on Earth slips away, Maali must come to grips with the kind of friend and lover he was, even as he flies around Colombo, contending with a host of ghouls and demons who hang off every car and building like ectoplasmic kudzu. Some of these vengeful phantoms — victims of torture, assassination or mass killings — want to help him; others want to devour him. Maali has to figure out which is which, as he struggles to solve the mystery of his own death.

His greatest challenge, though, is that it’s not easy to influence human events or communicate with the living once you’ve transitioned to the spectral realm. Maali can see and hear his friends’ growing peril as they approach the truth of what happened to him. But how can he lead them to the secret photos that will expose officials who used him and terrorized his countrymen?

And would that do any good anyhow? Has evidence ever stopped a mass killing or brought satisfaction to the dead?

As “The Seven Moons” swings wildly from absurd comedy to grotesque tragedy, Karunatilaka knocks down any grandiose naivete about the power of journalism to effect political change. This is a story in which the demons — even the snarling hell-hounds with faces trapped beneath their hairy hides — aren’t nearly as scary as the respected military commanders. What’s most surprising, though, is the book’s poignancy amid all its antics and mythological caterwauling. Again and again, some loony pratfall crashes into a burned village, a murdered child, an incinerated woman. These cacophonous tones remind us that the real world, too, can be a ghastly farce.

The novel’s deeper themes reach beyond politics to the problem of evil that threads through every theology and moral code. What, Karunatilaka asks, is our responsibility in the face of cruelty that God couldn’t or wouldn’t stop? His answer isn’t reassuring, but given the irreducible tension between vengeance and forgiveness, that’s all the insight you’ll ever get.

Ron Charles reviews books and writes the Book Club newsletter for The Washington Post.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

By Shehan Karunatilaka

W.W. Norton. 400 pp. $18.95

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THE SEVEN MOONS OF MAALI ALMEIDA

by Shehan Karunatilaka ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2022

A manic, witty, artfully imagined tale of speaking truth to power.

A murdered Sri Lankan photojournalist strives to put his afterlife to good use.

Karunatilaka’s rich, engrossing second novel, the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, opens with its title character in a post-mortem waiting room in 1990. There, he’s informed that he has seven moons (i.e., nights) to remain on Earth as a ghost before entering the Light and the next life. He could head Light-ward right away, but Maali has too many unanswered questions. How was he killed? Who killed him? What has happened to his lover, Dilan, and his best friend, Jaki? And can he somehow tip them off to the location of photos he shot that reveal the depths of the war-torn island’s atrocities? With that setup, Karunatilaka's novel is at once a murder mystery and a historical novel of the island nation’s violent struggles throughout the '80s. That necessitates explaining a host of ethnic and political factions, plus outside forces from India to the United States, on top of which Karunatilaka layers a host of otherworldly ghouls, demons, and spirits that Maali has to navigate. But despite that complexity, the novel reads smoothly and powerfully, buoyed by Maali’s defiant and flawed persona—his weeklong stint as a dead man means reckoning with his sexual promiscuity, gambling habit, and unsettled family as much as the riots and state-sponsored death squads he’s strived to expose. Though the novel is maximalist in its plotting, it’s intimate in the telling—Karunatilaka writes in the second person to better root the reader in a maelstrom of characters and otherworldly incidents. And the main point gets across: The world is sick with violence and corruption, but truth will out, and the possibility for change exists if we don't succumb to defeatism.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2022

ISBN: 978-1-324-06482-4

Page Count: 400

Publisher: Norton

Review Posted Online: Nov. 15, 2022

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2022

LITERARY FICTION | GENERAL FICTION

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New York Times Bestseller

by Kristin Hannah ‧ RELEASE DATE: Feb. 6, 2024

A dramatic, vividly detailed reconstruction of a little-known aspect of the Vietnam War.

A young woman’s experience as a nurse in Vietnam casts a deep shadow over her life.

When we learn that the farewell party in the opening scene is for Frances “Frankie” McGrath’s older brother—“a golden boy, a wild child who could make the hardest heart soften”—who is leaving to serve in Vietnam in 1966, we feel pretty certain that poor Finley McGrath is marked for death. Still, it’s a surprise when the fateful doorbell rings less than 20 pages later. His death inspires his sister to enlist as an Army nurse, and this turn of events is just the beginning of a roller coaster of a plot that’s impressive and engrossing if at times a bit formulaic. Hannah renders the experiences of the young women who served in Vietnam in all-encompassing detail. The first half of the book, set in gore-drenched hospital wards, mildewed dorm rooms, and boozy officers’ clubs, is an exciting read, tracking the transformation of virginal, uptight Frankie into a crack surgical nurse and woman of the world. Her tensely platonic romance with a married surgeon ends when his broken, unbreathing body is airlifted out by helicopter; she throws her pent-up passion into a wild affair with a soldier who happens to be her dead brother’s best friend. In the second part of the book, after the war, Frankie seems to experience every possible bad break. A drawback of the story is that none of the secondary characters in her life are fully three-dimensional: Her dismissive, chauvinistic father and tight-lipped, pill-popping mother, her fellow nurses, and her various love interests are more plot devices than people. You’ll wish you could have gone to Vegas and placed a bet on the ending—while it’s against all the odds, you’ll see it coming from a mile away.

Pub Date: Feb. 6, 2024

ISBN: 9781250178633

Page Count: 480

Publisher: St. Martin's

Review Posted Online: Nov. 4, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2023

FAMILY LIFE & FRIENDSHIP | GENERAL FICTION | HISTORICAL FICTION

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A LITTLE LIFE

by Hanya Yanagihara ‧ RELEASE DATE: March 10, 2015

The phrase “tour de force” could have been invented for this audacious novel.

Four men who meet as college roommates move to New York and spend the next three decades gaining renown in their professions—as an architect, painter, actor and lawyer—and struggling with demons in their intertwined personal lives.

Yanagihara ( The People in the Trees , 2013) takes the still-bold leap of writing about characters who don’t share her background; in addition to being male, JB is African-American, Malcolm has a black father and white mother, Willem is white, and “Jude’s race was undetermined”—deserted at birth, he was raised in a monastery and had an unspeakably traumatic childhood that’s revealed slowly over the course of the book. Two of them are gay, one straight and one bisexual. There isn’t a single significant female character, and for a long novel, there isn’t much plot. There aren’t even many markers of what’s happening in the outside world; Jude moves to a loft in SoHo as a young man, but we don’t see the neighborhood change from gritty artists’ enclave to glitzy tourist destination. What we get instead is an intensely interior look at the friends’ psyches and relationships, and it’s utterly enthralling. The four men think about work and creativity and success and failure; they cook for each other, compete with each other and jostle for each other’s affection. JB bases his entire artistic career on painting portraits of his friends, while Malcolm takes care of them by designing their apartments and houses. When Jude, as an adult, is adopted by his favorite Harvard law professor, his friends join him for Thanksgiving in Cambridge every year. And when Willem becomes a movie star, they all bask in his glow. Eventually, the tone darkens and the story narrows to focus on Jude as the pain of his past cuts deep into his carefully constructed life.  

Pub Date: March 10, 2015

ISBN: 978-0-385-53925-8

Page Count: 720

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Dec. 21, 2014

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 2015

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“The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” by Shehan Karunatilaka

A dead person who addresses himself in the second person “you” for the entirety of the novel is the narrator of Shehan Karunatilaka’s 2022 Booker Prize winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida . This, in itself, is a striking fact about this novel as the second person pronoun is a difficult narrative voice to sustain meaningfully and entertainingly for nearly four hundred pages. But Karunatilaka’s dead narrator tells his story skillfully and vivaciously with deadpan humor mixed in with unnerving descriptions of the Tamil genocide committed during the Sri Lankan civil war of the 1980s. In particular, the novel concerns itself with the unspeakable atrocities of the Tamil pogrom in July 1983, when, in the violent confrontation between the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam (LTTE), the government, the military, and the Marxist radicals, hundreds of Tamil citizens were violently executed and burned to death in their homes and out in the streets. The humor is somewhat unsettling. The novel is smart, it is funny, it is moving; but it is ultimately the heinous territory of genocide, torture, dismemberment, beheadings, and assassinations that we traverse.

Shehan Karunatilaka is the first Sri Lankan author to win the Booker, and the Sri Lankan civil war was a consequential genocide in modern history. It is estimated by various national and international  human rights organizations that thousands of Sri Lankans both Tamil and Sinhalese, were killed in the 26-year war that ended in 2009 with the government defeating the LTTE. Its consequences were far reaching. Many were displaced overseas never to return to the island. The Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by LTTE sympathizers in 1991 in India for India’s military intervention in the civil war on the side of the government in the form of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF). As Sri Lanka and the world approach 2023, the forty-year anniversary of the civil war, Karunatilaka’s novel and the Booker award underscore the presence and power of literary art as remembrance and historical witnessing.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida tells the story of Malinda Albert Kabalana Almeida, a professional photographer and a “fixer” for the foreign press covering the war, son of a Sinhalese father and a Eurasian Burgher  mother, the second person “you” narrator of the novel. The seven moons refer to the seven nights that he has at his disposal to finish whatever it is that dead entities have to finish in the land known as In Between (apparently, get an ear check, and finish paperwork), to go over to another region in the post-death world called The Light whose objective is to get you to forget this just finished life. Maali does not remember how he was murdered or who murdered him and why; the novel has the familiar stirrings of a murder mystery.

Maali is a slightly confused, but bemused and detached observer of the carnage on all sides— Tamil, Sinhalese, Marxist, the military—in the early chapters, which accounts for the sometimes-breezy register of the novel. For instance, here is Maali learning his way around the post-death region known as In Between. His teacher is Sena, a young Marxist radical murdered by the government:

Sena climbs to a vacant branch and you follow. “Why are we sitting here?” You ask.

      “mara trees catch winds. like radios catch frequencies. so do bo trees, banyan trees and probably any other big tree that blows winds.”,       “i thought the wind blows the trees.”,       “your grandfather thought the world was flat. do you want to be a ghost or a ghoul”,       “what’s the difference”,       “a ghost blows with the wind. a ghoul directs the wind.”.

One hesitates to use the word ghost, ghoul or spirit to describe what Maali Almeida is in this other world, or, to ascribe the word “limbo” or “purgatory” to characterize the other world in this novel. From the biased perspective of the living, the newly murdered Maali is closer to life than death for the duration of the novel.

This place where the dead perambulate—the setting of this novel—has an uncanny resemblance to the “real” Sri Lanka, as much as novels can be said to represent “reality” within their covers. The murdered entities occupy every inch of Colombo, the main setting of the novel, and every other place in the novel, which has a certain peripatetic quality to it. The dead move, glide and fly in the wind, on top of planes, trains and automobiles, like Patrick Swayze’s character in the 1990 film Ghost , standing neck to neck with the living in their rooms, their chairs, beds, palaces of torture, jungles where the bodies of the murdered rot in the heat, polluted lakes where the dismembered limbs and carved heads are thrown, blowing and breathing and whispering in their ears, listening to their conversations, responding to them and talking to each other. This narrative layering is deftly done throughout the novel, and the alternating voices of the living and the dead side by side in the same place and time raises the possibility that the visible world is suffused with negotiations and transactions taking place in an invisible realm. Was Hamlet right when he observed, “There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy?”

“I feel there is a presence around my son,” says Stanley to Crow Man. “I feel it around me at times.”

      “what kind of presence” asks the blind man in robes, as he casts breadcrumbs to the parrots. behind him, the sparrowboy lights the lamps of each shrine and then goes back to his corner and his transcribing of letters that you cannot read.,       “it is like a wind. an ugly chill. i get shivers whenever i am around my son.”.

While Maali Almeida is on a mission to find out who killed him, he is also appalled to discover that the government and the military forces are after his lover, Dilan Dharmendra, or DD, for short, the son of Stanley Dharmendra, a cabinet minister, and Jaki, his friend and DD’s cousin. They have access to a box of photographs that Maali shot which incriminates the government and the military in the Tamil pogrom of 1983. Maali’s photographs are a stand-in for Karunatilaka’s novel itself; a forensic witnessing of the Sri Lankan holocaust.

It was the hour after the last shell had dropped and the air was still smoky and smelly. You stumbled through dust and you saw the wailing. You could not hear it, because your ear was abuzz with the low hum at the end of the world, the frequency that spirits swirled at, the white noise of a thousand screams. But, all around you, you saw the wailing. People had stopped running and were rooted to the spot and staring at the heavens and roaring. There was a woman holding a dead child, there was an old man peppered with shrapnel, and a stray dog shuddering beneath a broken palmyra. The celestial finger released the mute button and the screams were unleashed on your ears. There were no medics or aid workers or freedom fighters or insurgents or separatists to help. There were only poor villagers and one poor fixer.

The novel references several historical events and personalities from the civil war; for instance, the character of the corrupt minister Cyril Wijeratne appears to be modeled after the real Ranjan Wijeratne, the minister of Defense to whom the government’s death squads allegedly reported, and, the character of the savage military general Major Raja Udugampola, the leader of Sri Lankan Tactical Force who runs the torture palace appears to be modeled after the real Deputy Police Inspector General Premadasa Udugampola who allegedly oversaw the torture and murder of Tamil separatists and Marxist radicals. Seven Moons opens with an epigraph from the poem Good Friday 1975 by the Sri Lankan poet and activist Richard de Zoysa: “Father, forgive them,/ for I will never.” Zoysa was kidnapped and killed in February 1990 allegedly by death squads with high level ties to the government.

The novel, in effect, merges three or more genres—murder mystery, ghost story, historical novel, political satire, and the supernatural thriller. Into this mélange, Karunatilaka weaves a homosexual love story between Maali and DD. While Maali is open about his sexuality, and the novel gives a panoramic and gritty view of the gay subculture of Colombo and rural Sri Lanka, DD is a closeted individual whose secret sexual orientation  eventually pays a heavy price in the resolution of the personal and the political conflicts in the novel.

The final section of the novel, which is organized into seven sections, each one named for one of the moons of the titular seven moons, opens with an epigraph from Shutter Island, the 2003 novel by the American novelist Dennis Lehane.

“God’s gift,” the warden said, “His violence … God loves violence. You understand that, don’t you? … Why else would there be so much of it? It’s in us. It comes out of us. It is what we do more naturally than we breathe. There is no moral order at all. There is only this – can my violence conquer yours?”

Martin Scorcese made a film based on Lehane’s novel, and it is quite possible to see The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida optioned for the silver screen. Not only does it have spectacle, mostly of the violent kind, but it also, more interestingly and more ambitiously, explores the limits, constraints, and mechanisms of translating between times and places within narrative borders. How does the living communicate with the dead? How do those borders look? How do you move between life and death? Between language, thought and silence? There is an engaging level of world building in the novel that would translate very well to a film narrative.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, which was published in India in 2020 under the title Chats with the Dead is Karunatilaka’s second novel. His first novel Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew , from 2010, won both the Gratiaen prize and the Commonwealth Book prize, and it has been described by many reviewers as the best “cricket novel”. Karunatilaka’s civil war novel is a fearless take on a vast and painful national subject not to restage historical inequities and hostilities, but to stand with Sri Lanka by amplifying the voices of its dead against oblivion and invisibility in the march of time.

Gayatri Devi is Professor of English at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Savannah, Georgia.

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Arts & Culture , Books , Editor's Pick , Literature , Reviews

BOOK REVIEW: THE SEVEN MOONS OF MAALI ALMEIDA

It’s 1990 in Colombo, Sri Lanka where a brutal civil war continues to rage and our protagonist is dead. He provides his eulogy, “If you had a business card, this is what it would say. Maali Almeida. Photographer. Gambler. Slut.” And so begins our introduction to the Maali and his awakening in the afterlife, which is as bureaucratic and chaotic as the world he has suddenly departed from.

As Maali begins to navigate the forms and regulations of the afterlife’s waiting room, he can’t remember how he died. The white-robed helpers are obtuse about what comes after, reminding him that rules are rules, and that he has seven moons (a week) to get his affairs in order before he enters “The Light” to be reborn. 

Within the wider organising structure of the seven moons that the book is segmented into, there are vignettes scattered through each chapter that flicker between past and present. While most ghosts only have memories of their lives, our licentious narrator had his faithful Nikon 3ST and a box full of hard proof of the horrors he has seen. Photos that could, in his view, “bring down governments. Photos that could stop wars.” If only they weren’t in a white box under his bed. In seven moons he must, somehow, bring these images to Sri Lanka’s attention otherwise, he reflects, his life’s work will have been for nothing. Not only that, but he has to find out who killed him. A busy week, indeed.

Karunatilaka’s Booker-shortlisted novel is not easily categorisable. It is predominantly a bitingly wry satire of the violence and corruption of the Sri Lankan civil war, which blazed from 1983-2009. The novel’s action takes place in these early years, focusing on the riots of 1983, in which the militant Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam (LTTE or Tigers) killed 13 Sri Lankan Army soldiers. The aftermath inflamed anti-Tamil sentiment resulting in mass violence at the hands of Sinhalese mobs. An estimated 3,000 people died and hundreds of Sri Lankan Tamils fled the pogroms. The Sri Lankan government is said to have done nothing. This government had the power to torture and disappear dissidents and has since been accused of state terrorism, but didn’t intervene. 

Against this relentless violence, Maali was embedded in the queer community, leaving behind a litany of lovers. While there is romance here, it is mystery that drives the plot, as he seeks his killer from the afterlife. Karunatilaka also paints broad strokes with magical realism; ghosts in various states of decay bicker, animal ghosts talk, and a particularly chatty leopard wants to harness electricity. As the author says, there are many thematic balls to juggle, but he sees “a love triangle at the heart of this, some tender relationships and a fair bit of ghostly philosophising.”

While it may feel like a lot to wrap your head around, Karunatilaka’s vivid characters and snappy vignettes add to his ability to effortlessly weave multiple threads of time. Whether we are wandering the “In Between,” in the aftermath of a brutal massacre, or playing blackjack in his favourite casino, we root for Maali despite, or perhaps because of, his flaws. He is a master of bluffing and is still trying to beat the odds as the stakes get increasingly high in the afterlife. 

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida moves at a thriller pace with a James Bond-esque cast of corrupt villains, both living and dead, who make deathly deals in the shadows. Yet while the pacing makes Seven Moons unputdownable, the way in which Karunatilaka explores the afterlife and the physicality of the unseen world make this story all the more gripping.

Firstly, the second-person narrative draws us into Maali’s quest, which twists and turns like the winds that carry his ghostly form around Colombo. The narrative ‘you’ helps to draw the multiple selves of Maali’s past and present together, both his ghost self and the self that witnessed the unspeakable violence that splintered his psyche. It is little wonder he leans towards hedonistic sex and gambling after all he has photographed and, more importantly, did not or could not prevent. As part of Karunatilaka’s “ghostly philosophising”, the reader, too, joins Maali as he contemplates life’s existential questions that are not neatly resolved.

While “Helpers” guide newly lost souls towards “The Light,” there are darker forces in the afterlife looking to consume them to unfavourable ends. On top of it all, Maali is dogged by the Mahakali, a terrifying shape-shifting Hindu goddess who eats souls. In one disconcerting interaction, she is disguised as a dead priest who laments the state of Sri Lanka. Prompted by their woeful conversation, Maali feels pain, despite not being alive. The pain is both emotional and existential turned bodily: “And, suddenly, the cold transforms into something familiar. Not something, perhaps more of an absence of thing, an emptiness that stretches to the horizon, a void that has known you forever.” It is by tapping into this deeply human pain of questioning the ‘point’ of things, especially in a country plagued by corruption and bloodshed, that the Mahakali traps her victims. She lures them to give up their souls and become part of her ever-changing form, ensnared forever.

But the ghosts are not completely powerless. If they’re savvy, they can trade with the witch doctor Crow Man to whisper to the humans on earth. Maali realises that the dead have far more impact on the events of the living than they are given credit for: “Ghosts are invisible to those with breath, invisible like guilt or gravity or electricity or thoughts. Thousands of unseen hands direct the course of every life. And those being directed call it God or karma or dumb luck or other less than accurate names.” And so, of course, demons impact corrupt political figures and a ghost army is being formed to seek revenge on the human world, as the scarred political landscape transcends Sri Lanka’s physical plain.

The bureaucracy of the afterlife is almost a welcome breath of fresh air. Between getting your ears checked and visiting Level Forty-Two (a nod to Hitchhiker’s fans), the waiting room may be crowded but at least there’s a system. When Maali asks a Helper what The Light looks like, she mysteriously replies, “Whatever You Need It To Be.” Seven Moons is also like that. Whether you need a romance, a comedy, a satirical political history, horror, or the absurd, Karunatilaka defies genre and invites us to imagine the world beyond to ask how, and if, we could make this one better for this life or from the next. 

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

By Shehan Karunatilaka 

Sort Of Books, 368 pages

Jennifer Brough

Jennifer Brough (she/they) is a slow writer and workshop facilitator based in Nottingham. She is working on her first poetry pamphlet, Occult Pain, which explores the body, pain, and gender through a magical, disability justice lens. She is also the founding member of resting up collective, an interdisciplinary sick group of artists that offers workshops on rest and creativity. Find her on Instagram @occultpain

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The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida Paperback – November 1, 2022

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An Instant National Bestseller • One of the New York Times 's 100 Notable Books of 2022 • An NPR Book We Loved in 2022 • Named a Best Fiction Book of 2022 by the Washington Post , Times (UK), Financial Times , and The Guardian. Winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a searing satire set amid the mayhem of the Sri Lankan civil war.

Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida―war photographer, gambler, and closet queen―has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers, and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to the photos that will rock Sri Lanka.

Ten years after his prize-winning novel Chinaman established him as one of Sri Lanka’s foremost authors, Shehan Karunatilaka is back with a “thrilling satire” ( Economist ) and rip-roaring state-of-the-nation epic that offers equal parts mordant wit and disturbing, profound truths.

• Print length 400 pages
• Language English
• Publisher W. W. Norton & Company
• Publication date November 1, 2022
• Dimensions 5.5 x 1 x 8.3 inches
• ISBN-10 132406482X
• ISBN-13 978-1324064824
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ W. W. Norton & Company (November 1, 2022)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Paperback ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 132406482X
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1324064824
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 10.8 ounces
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.5 x 1 x 8.3 inches
• #303 in Fiction Satire
• #2,484 in Literary Fiction (Books)

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Shehan Karunatilaka wins Booker prize for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

Judges described the Sri Lankan author’s second novel as a ‘rollercoaster journey through life and death’ and praised its audacity and ambition

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka has won the Booker prize for fiction. The judges praised the “ambition of its scope, and the hilarious audacity of its narrative techniques”.

Karunatilaka’s second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida comes more than a decade after his debut, Chinaman, which was published in 2011. The Booker-winning novel tells the story of the photographer of its title, who in 1990 wakes up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. With no idea who killed him, Maali has seven moons to contact the people he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos of civil war atrocities that will rock Sri Lanka.

Neil MacGregor, chair of the judges for this year’s prize, said the novel was chosen because “it’s a book that takes the reader on a rollercoaster journey through life and death right to what the author describes as the dark heart of the world”.

“And there the reader finds, to their surprise, joy, tenderness, love and loyalty,” he added.

MacGregor was joined on the judging panel by academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari; historian Helen Castor; novelist and critic M John Harrison; and novelist, poet and professor Alain Mabanckou. The judges were unanimous in their decision to award the prize to Karunatilaka, according to the chair.

Receiving his prize, Karunatilaka addressed the people of Sri Lanka in Tamil and Sinhalese. He summarised what he said in English: “I write these books for you… Let’s keep sharing these stories.”

He said he hopes that one day the political situation in Sri Lanka will be such that his novel will “sit on the fantasy shelves of bookshops”.

This year the original 1969 Booker prize trophy was reinstated in memory of its creator, the children’s author and illustrator Jan Pieńkowski, who died in February.

The trophy was presented to Karunatilaka by Camilla, the Queen Consort, in one of her first official public engagements since she took on her new role, at a ceremony hosted by comedian Sophie Duker at the Roundhouse in London. Last year’s winner Damon Galgut presented Karunatilaka with his prize money of £50,000.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is published by the independent press Sort of Books. This year is the first time a book by the publisher has been longlisted for the prize. Karunatilaka has become the second Sri Lankan-born author to win, following Michael Ondaatje, who won in 1992 with The English Patient.

In his Guardian review, Tomiwa Owolade said the book’s “scenarios are often absurd … but executed with a humour and pathos that ground the reader”. He added: “Karunatilaka has done artistic justice to a terrible period in his country’s history.”

Karunatilaka, was born in Galle, Sri Lanka, in 1975 and grew up in Colombo. Chinaman won the Commonwealth prize, the DSL and the Gratiaen prize, and was selected for the BBC and The Reading Agency’s Big Jubilee Read. The author has also written rock songs and screenplays. His next book, short story collection The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises, is due to be published in July 2023.

The other books on the shortlist were Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo, The Trees by Percival Everett, Treacle Walker by Alan Garner, Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan and Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout.

MacGregor said that although all six books on the shortlist were very different, “it became clear … that they were all really about one question, and that is ‘what’s the importance of an individual life?’”

Bea Carvalho, head of fiction at Waterstones, said she and her colleagues were “thrilled” that Karunatilaka’s “fiercely inventive novel” had won.

She described The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida as “a triumphant, epic feat of imagination and wisdom which dissects a dark period of our recent history with satire and panache”.

Filmed extracts from the shortlisted books , directed by Kevin Thomas and starring Nikki Amuka-Bird, Jarvis Cocker, Anna Friel, David Harewood, Sharon Horgan and Prasanna Puwanarajah, were shown during the ceremony.

Singer-songwriter Dua Lipa delivered a keynote speech on how her love of reading helped her connect with her family and identity. She said early obsessions included Roald Dahl and Malorie Blackman, “both of whom gave me little pearls of wisdom that still guide me today”.

Earlier this year, the singer launched a podcast called At Your Service , with guests including Hanya Yanagihara and Min Jin Lee. She said speaking one-to-one with some of her favourite authors was “honestly better than any therapy session I’ve ever been to”.

The ceremony was broadcast as part of a 45-minute Front Row special on BBC Radio 4, where presenter Samira Ahmed interviewed British-Turkish author Elif Shafak about what the attack on Salman Rushdie’s life means for writers around the world. The ceremony also paid tribute to double-Booker winner Hilary Mantel , who died in September.

To explore all the titles on the Booker prize 2022 shortlist visit guardianbookshop.com . Delivery charges may apply.

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Booker Book Review #6 – “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” by Shehan Karunatilaka

This week I have at last come to the end of two reading marathons, one has been spectacular, the other has been a slog. Almost two months after the winner of the Booker Prize was announced, I have at last finished the sixth book from the shortlist, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, the book which in fact won. I started this book on 26th September, but found it very difficult to get into, so I switched to one or two others. It was the only book I did not manage to complete in time for the announcement of the winner. I have to say that I am somewhat surprised that it won. But then that is not unusual for the Booker, or any literary prize for that matter. Reading pleasure is such a subjective thing that I am sure there are very few works that are unanimously loved. There are also books that you just ‘know’ are good, but which are not that enjoyable to read. For me, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida perhaps falls into that category. I can appreciate the achievement, but it just wasn’t for me.

The book is set in Sri Lanka (the author’s homeland) at the time of the brutal civil war in that country, which started in 1983 and last more than 25 years. I am ashamed to admit that I knew very little about this piece of history. Some of the information had a familiarity; I was aware for example of the conflict between the Tamils and the Sinhalese, though I had no idea that the regime was so brutal or repressive. Sri Lanka has also been in the news recently after the terrible economic situation there led to nationwide street protests and the downfall of the Rajapaksa regime. Clearly, it is a country where corrupt members of the ruling classes (many of whom have been related to one another) have at various times pocketed the nation’s wealth for their own enrichment and to the detriment of the wider population. 

Seven Moons has been described by the author as a ghost story and in addition to the history lesson and the expose of the corruption, repression and factionalism which characterised the authorities at that time, it is said to weave in myth and folklore surrounding death and the afterlife in Sri Lanka. It reminded me very much of a previous Booker winner Lincoln in the Bardo , by George Saunders, which won in 2017. It concerns that period of transition where the spirit is in a kind of limbo between life and death. 

Maali Almeida is the central character and the book opens with him having just died and in the process of entering the afterlife. The ‘seven moons’ relates to the period of time he has left to tie up unfinished business from his life. Maali was a photojournalist and in the course of his work he gathered together photographic evidence of some of the crimes of military leaders against the rebels and against other journalists reporting on the civil war. As such, the book becomes a bit of a murder-mystery as the nature of Maali’s ‘evidence’ becomes clear. Some people had a powerful interest in the material never seeing the light of day. Maali knew this of course and concealed what he had in an elaborate trail involving playing cards and his two best friends: Jaki, with whom he slightly masqueraded as a couple, and DD, the son of a government minister who was his lover. Homosexuality was not accepted in the culture at that time, hence the concealment, but Maali had many lovers and rebelled against the prevailing homophobia and this is another complication which made him a target. 

There is a wide cast of characters in the book (not dissimilar to Lincoln in the Bardo actually), and many of the more colourful or fantastical ones exist in the spirit world. There is a real contrast between the passages which take place in the earthly world and those in the heavenly realm where Maali is floating, plotting, and whispering instructions in the ears of those he has left behind. I found some of these characters difficult to keep track of and those at the centre (Maali, Jaki, DD) I just found hard to warm to.

The novel is quite fast-paced with some strong action sequences, but for me the flitting between the earthly and heavenly realms was just too bitty. I found it hard to keep a grip on what was going on. That can be true of a lot of books that I have loved, but I’m afraid this one just did not sustain my interest. Had I not been the sort of person who has to finish a book I have started (I can count on one hand the number of books I have abandoned) I would probably have given up on this after the first or second moon.

Moons feature heavily in the other marathon book I have just finished – 1Q84 . This was quite a different undertaking and my feelings about it could not be more different. I’ll save my review of that for next week!

So, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida , well it won the Booker, but…I’m struggling to recommend it, sadly, unless you are a student of Sri Lankan recent history.

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4 thoughts on “Booker Book Review #6 – “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” by Shehan Karunatilaka”

haha, I also finished the book recently. similar feelings toward this book.

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Oh really! How interesting.

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Literary Review

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Frank Lawton

The meat of the matter, out of the shadows, bridge too far, the librarian cometh, dead man talking, the seven moons of maali almeida, by shehan karunatilaka, sort of books 368pp £16.99.

S hehan Karunatilaka’s freewheeling debut, Chinaman , won a clutch of awards in 2010. In it, a cynical, drink-soaked narrator tries to track down a possibly dead cricketer in a Sri Lanka riven by civil war. In Karunatilaka’s new novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida , the titular narrator is a war photographer, gambler and ‘slut’ who also likes a drink, while Sri Lanka still likes to shed its own blood. But while the two novels traverse similar historical terrain, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is far from a retreading.

The novel is narrated by Maali in the second person. ‘You’ awake in a cross between an underfunded job centre and an A&E department after an explosion. The year is 1990 and you are dead. This is the In-Between, an overcrowded state of limbo, and everyone is shouting, bleeding and lost.

Down There (the world of the living), Maali’s body has been butchered and dumped in the Beira Lake, whose putrid stench (like ‘a powerful deity has squatted over it, emptied its bowels … and forgotten to flush’) epitomises the rot of Sri Lanka itself. He doesn’t know why he’s dead or who killed him. He has only seven moons in which to discover how he died, contact his family and lead them to his tranche of secret photographs, which, he believes, have the power to transform Sri Lanka. After seven moons, the door to The Light – a sort of forgetful heaven – will be closed forever.

The difficulty for Maali is that, despite the Dante-esque division of the world into three spheres, there’s no Virgil to guide him. Instead, a chorus of voices vie for his trust. We, as readers, are as unsure of whom to believe as Maali is. Do we follow the murdered lecturer trying to steer us to The Light, or the man clad in garbage bags that ‘flap like wings … making a gesture that you cannot read’ and promising justice for your killers Down There? Can we even trust Maali himself, with his partial memories and addiction to infidelity? This celestial tussle for Maali’s soul plays out alongside a chaotic dash for his photos.

Maali’s voice is wise, weary and whip-smart, by turns self-reproaching and smug. As we read on, it becomes clear that the second-person narration has a deeper significance than was at first apparent, for this is a world in which ‘every person you see has a spirit crouching behind them’, whispering. The living mistake the whisperings for their own thoughts. As ‘you’ are spoken to by Maali’s spirit, his thoughts become yours, an effect that reaches a climax in the final pages, where Karunatilaka dissolves the remaining gap between Maali and us in an act of reincarnation.

For worlds like Karunatilaka’s to work, an author must set governing rules, so that the fantastic is not used as an easy trick to just magic away plot problems. Karunatilaka does briefly fall into this trap, with a new rule, discovered two-thirds of the way through and leading to an important plot development a few pages later, feeling overly convenient. But generally, his creation is hard won.

Of course, the most grimly absurd element of the world is not the demonology but Sri Lanka, Down There (Karunatilaka’s eschatology has no need for hell when the civil war does the job better than any devil could). Karunatilaka’s Sri Lanka is a land where executioners and lawmakers are one and the same, Tamil extremists murder Tamil moderates in an attempt to establish a Tamil state, communists ‘murder the working class while they liberate them’ and the members of the Indian peace-keeping force ‘are willing to burn villages to fulfil their mission’. We are through the looking glass, darkly.

Some critics have seen The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida as a purely dystopian satire. But this misses the hope at the book’s core. For Karunatilaka also satirises those who see the world as a flat, material place without deeper meaning. Indeed, one way of reading the novel is as a slow unfurling of a kind of faith in the enchantedness of the world and the possibility of redemption. For while ending up in the afterlife comes as something of a shock to a wise-cracking atheist like Maali (‘it appears that the sheep made the smarter bet’), over the course of the novel he relinquishes his characteristic evasiveness and selfishness and performs a sacrificial act of love, seeking to save in death ‘the friend you let down the most’ in life.

Witty, inventive and moving, Karunatilaka’s prose is gloriously free of cliché, and despite the apparent cynicism of his smart-alec narrator, this is a deeply moral book that eschews the simple moralising of so much contemporary fiction. It would be a deserving winner of the Booker Prize, for which is has been shortlisted. But as Maali Almeida knows, you don’t always get what you deserve.

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The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida – Shehan Karunatilaka

I am one of those people who is always interested in the Man Booker Prize, from those that are shortlisted to those that eventually win the award. Over the past few years, I have slowly started to make some headway with past winners and so this time around, it’s 2022’s winner The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.

We follow Maali through the afterlife, in order to solve his own murder inside of seven moons. We are transported through the streets of Colombo, as we eavesdrop with Maali on the conversations between friends, lovers and enemies. The afterlife is filled with ghosts, ghouls and demons, who help him navigate his way through this period; though some with ulterior motives.

In his previous life, he worked with politicians, activists and foreign diplomats to take photos of the atrocities occurring in the Sri Lankan Civil War; some of which incriminate members of the Sri Lankan government. The photos that he has left behind, are in his opinion vital to bring down the government and end the war that has engulfed his country. He makes it his mission to get his friends to find these and publish them.

The whole book perfectly pulls together historical fiction, magical realism and politics in with a jet-black sense of humour. It’s ambitious in its scope and kaleidoscopic in its narrative. It provides a snapshot of the tumultuous events in Sri Lanka’s not so distant past. Given how visceral and eye opening some of the events are in this book, it’s written in such a lyrical and dream-like way, that it envelops you and doesn’t allow the darkness of everything to become all encompassing.

Having no understanding of the political events or of the country as a whole, Karunatilaka does a phenomenal job of creating a narrative around these events that it’s easily accessible for everyone. You get an understanding of those involved in the war and the parts that they play, whether it is the factionalism in the Tamils, to the role of the Sri Lankan government, to those foreign countries who have a vested interest in the country. Whilst there are parts that are a bit slow or repetitive, this is an excellent book and one treads the perfect line between the telling of such a dark period of time in Sri Lanka’s history, with the light of the sardonic humour and lyrical prose throughout. It’s the first book I’ve read of Karunatilaka’s and I look forward to reading more of his work in the future.

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