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The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
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.
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.
386 pages, Hardcover
First published August 4, 2022
About the author
Shehan Karunatilaka
12 books856 followersShehan Karunatilaka lives and works in Singapore. He has written advertisements, rock songs, travel stories, and bass lines. This is his first novel.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 5,382 reviews
January 12, 2024
A war photographer in Sri Lanka is murdered, and enters the afterlife: a tax office.
He he has 7 moons until his soul leaves the earth forever, but can travel around to anywhere his name is uttered. We watch alongside our protagonist as the people who loved (and hated) him search and grieve, reflecting on his life's work. The pictures he took could change the world, and expose the brutalities of civil war forever.
Captivatingly written with pathos and wit, it’s surreal and absurd but meticulously crafted, capturing conversations between the living and between the dead. Shehan Karunatilaka's real superpower, though, is his ability to produce the perfect metaphor; always idiosyncratic and relentlessly powerful.
The novel is sometimes a tad repetitive, with slight pacing issues, and the second person tense is tricky, though I do think it adds to the urgency of the book. Overall I found it truly unflinching, chronicling the fragility of life and the horrifying realities of violence.
4.5/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
He he has 7 moons until his soul leaves the earth forever, but can travel around to anywhere his name is uttered. We watch alongside our protagonist as the people who loved (and hated) him search and grieve, reflecting on his life's work. The pictures he took could change the world, and expose the brutalities of civil war forever.
Captivatingly written with pathos and wit, it’s surreal and absurd but meticulously crafted, capturing conversations between the living and between the dead. Shehan Karunatilaka's real superpower, though, is his ability to produce the perfect metaphor; always idiosyncratic and relentlessly powerful.
The novel is sometimes a tad repetitive, with slight pacing issues, and the second person tense is tricky, though I do think it adds to the urgency of the book. Overall I found it truly unflinching, chronicling the fragility of life and the horrifying realities of violence.
4.5/5 ⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️
December 27, 2022
WINNER of the 2022 Booker Prize !!!
“All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair. Many get luck, and many get misery. Many are born to homes with books, many grow up in the swamps of war. In the end, all becomes dust. All stories conclude with a fade to black.”
Set in 1990 Colombo, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka begins with our protagonist - professional war photographer, closeted gay and compulsive gambler- Malinda Albert Kabalana a.k.a. Maali Almeida, waking up, dazed and confused, initially assuming his condition to be the after effect of the “silly pills” his close friend Jaki shares with him. However, he soon realizes that he is now deceased (with no recollection of how he died) and is now in the afterlife - a crowded, chaotic place that he compares to a bureaucracy with its long queues and precise list of procedural formalities. He has “seven moons” (translates to seven nights), in the “In Between”, where he can roam free, recall his past life, complete the required formalities and proceed toward “The Light”.
Over the next seven moons, Maali desperately attempts to communicate with his friends, family or anyone who can hear him. He requires assistance to complete an unfinished task – among his earthly possessions is a box that contains photographs taken during his assignments- photographs of the death and devastation he has witnessed first-hand in 1980s Sri Lanka, victims including activists (who have been “disappeared”) journalists who are assumed missing and incriminating pictures of powerful people. In his own words,
” ‘These are not holiday snaps. These are photos that will bring down governments. Photos that could stop wars.’”
“Down There", his family and friends, frantically search for Maali, initially unaware that he has been killed. They approach the police who, among themselves, are initially confused about whether this disappearance warrants an investigation or a cover-up. Unbeknownst to them, many will try anything to get their hands on the photographs and Maali’s death is just a starting point for more chaos.
In the “In Between”, as Maali tries to figure out a way to get the photographs to the right people and piece together the events that led to his death, he meets an interesting mix of ghosts, ghouls, pretas and demons . He finds himself in a tug-of-war between the ghost of an academic murdered by Tamil extremists who guides Maali to complete all necessary formalities to proceed onwards and leave his past life behind and a slain member of the JVP (the communist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna),who has joined forces with a vengeful demon, and who wants him to join forces to exact revenge on those responsible for the death and devastation of many innocents victims and offers to help him find his killers. He meets others who have remained in the "In Between"- ghosts of victims of violence, others who have died by suicide as well as the ghost of a leopard. In his attempt to establish contact with the living, Maali also encounters "The Crow Man" - a holy man who serves as a medium between both worlds – catering to the needs of both, his help offered at a price.
“Evil is not what we should fear. Creatures with power acting in their own interest: that is what should make us shudder.”
“Down There” we get to meet people from Maali’s life – friends, secret lovers, family members, powerful men who have employed his services in the past, political leaders and their hired goons and those Maali met on assignments covering the some of the darkest episodes in 1980s Sri Lanka (the 1983 Tamil genocide among them).
Narrated in the second person, this heady cocktail of magical realism, historical fiction, political satire and dark humor takes us through one of the darkest chapters in Sri Lanka’s history. A cast of interesting characters – both living and the deceased (“ghost, ghoul, preta, devil, yaka, demon”), the dream-like quality of writing and the vivid descriptions of the political unrest, violence, and corruption in the civil war-torn country make for a compelling read. The narrative jumps back and forth between the present day in both the living world and the "In Between" with flashbacks from Maali's professional and personal lives filling us in on the events leading up to Maali's death.
“It is not Good vs Evil out here. It is varying degrees of bad, squabbling with conglomerates of the wicked.”
The author is bold and unflinching in his description of the different warring factions within the country -Tamil Tigers, LTTE, the JVP as well as the Sri Lankan government, military and the police. He also does not hesitate to turn a critical eye to the role played by foreign countries and international organizations who offered intervention and aid during those years. I can’t say that this is an easy read, but yes, the satirical approach and the sardonic humor keep it from becoming too overwhelming. The author also gives us a brief look into the history of the country - facts about the history of colonialism in Sri Lanka and the aftermath, the turbulent political landscape, the myths, religious beliefs and customs of the region and also references the Mahavamsa - the epic poem, written originally in Pali, that chronicles the ancient history and origin of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).
“ ‘History is people with ships and weapons wiping out those who forgot to invent them. Every civilisation begins with a genocide. It is the rule of the universe. The immutable law of the jungle, even this one made of concrete. You can see it in the movement of the stars, and in the dance of every atom. The rich will enslave the penniless. The strong will crush the weak.’”
Although the narrative did seem to slow down in parts with some minor repetitiveness, overall "The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida" is an exceptionally well-written, immersive and powerful story, truly deserving of its place on the Booker Prize shortlist. This is my first time reading Shehan Karunatilaka and I look forward to reading more of his work.
“All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair. Many get luck, and many get misery. Many are born to homes with books, many grow up in the swamps of war. In the end, all becomes dust. All stories conclude with a fade to black.”
Set in 1990 Colombo, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka begins with our protagonist - professional war photographer, closeted gay and compulsive gambler- Malinda Albert Kabalana a.k.a. Maali Almeida, waking up, dazed and confused, initially assuming his condition to be the after effect of the “silly pills” his close friend Jaki shares with him. However, he soon realizes that he is now deceased (with no recollection of how he died) and is now in the afterlife - a crowded, chaotic place that he compares to a bureaucracy with its long queues and precise list of procedural formalities. He has “seven moons” (translates to seven nights), in the “In Between”, where he can roam free, recall his past life, complete the required formalities and proceed toward “The Light”.
Over the next seven moons, Maali desperately attempts to communicate with his friends, family or anyone who can hear him. He requires assistance to complete an unfinished task – among his earthly possessions is a box that contains photographs taken during his assignments- photographs of the death and devastation he has witnessed first-hand in 1980s Sri Lanka, victims including activists (who have been “disappeared”) journalists who are assumed missing and incriminating pictures of powerful people. In his own words,
” ‘These are not holiday snaps. These are photos that will bring down governments. Photos that could stop wars.’”
“Down There", his family and friends, frantically search for Maali, initially unaware that he has been killed. They approach the police who, among themselves, are initially confused about whether this disappearance warrants an investigation or a cover-up. Unbeknownst to them, many will try anything to get their hands on the photographs and Maali’s death is just a starting point for more chaos.
In the “In Between”, as Maali tries to figure out a way to get the photographs to the right people and piece together the events that led to his death, he meets an interesting mix of ghosts, ghouls, pretas and demons . He finds himself in a tug-of-war between the ghost of an academic murdered by Tamil extremists who guides Maali to complete all necessary formalities to proceed onwards and leave his past life behind and a slain member of the JVP (the communist Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna),who has joined forces with a vengeful demon, and who wants him to join forces to exact revenge on those responsible for the death and devastation of many innocents victims and offers to help him find his killers. He meets others who have remained in the "In Between"- ghosts of victims of violence, others who have died by suicide as well as the ghost of a leopard. In his attempt to establish contact with the living, Maali also encounters "The Crow Man" - a holy man who serves as a medium between both worlds – catering to the needs of both, his help offered at a price.
“Evil is not what we should fear. Creatures with power acting in their own interest: that is what should make us shudder.”
“Down There” we get to meet people from Maali’s life – friends, secret lovers, family members, powerful men who have employed his services in the past, political leaders and their hired goons and those Maali met on assignments covering the some of the darkest episodes in 1980s Sri Lanka (the 1983 Tamil genocide among them).
Narrated in the second person, this heady cocktail of magical realism, historical fiction, political satire and dark humor takes us through one of the darkest chapters in Sri Lanka’s history. A cast of interesting characters – both living and the deceased (“ghost, ghoul, preta, devil, yaka, demon”), the dream-like quality of writing and the vivid descriptions of the political unrest, violence, and corruption in the civil war-torn country make for a compelling read. The narrative jumps back and forth between the present day in both the living world and the "In Between" with flashbacks from Maali's professional and personal lives filling us in on the events leading up to Maali's death.
“It is not Good vs Evil out here. It is varying degrees of bad, squabbling with conglomerates of the wicked.”
The author is bold and unflinching in his description of the different warring factions within the country -Tamil Tigers, LTTE, the JVP as well as the Sri Lankan government, military and the police. He also does not hesitate to turn a critical eye to the role played by foreign countries and international organizations who offered intervention and aid during those years. I can’t say that this is an easy read, but yes, the satirical approach and the sardonic humor keep it from becoming too overwhelming. The author also gives us a brief look into the history of the country - facts about the history of colonialism in Sri Lanka and the aftermath, the turbulent political landscape, the myths, religious beliefs and customs of the region and also references the Mahavamsa - the epic poem, written originally in Pali, that chronicles the ancient history and origin of Ceylon (now Sri Lanka).
“ ‘History is people with ships and weapons wiping out those who forgot to invent them. Every civilisation begins with a genocide. It is the rule of the universe. The immutable law of the jungle, even this one made of concrete. You can see it in the movement of the stars, and in the dance of every atom. The rich will enslave the penniless. The strong will crush the weak.’”
Although the narrative did seem to slow down in parts with some minor repetitiveness, overall "The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida" is an exceptionally well-written, immersive and powerful story, truly deserving of its place on the Booker Prize shortlist. This is my first time reading Shehan Karunatilaka and I look forward to reading more of his work.
January 18, 2023
How could I not fall for a novel whose plot superficially resembles the movie 'Ghost'? That's not to say this book was inspired by that film as its use of ghosts caught “In-Between” is rooted in Sri Lankan folklore, but it's the reference which immediately came to my mind when reading this tremendous story. There may not be any Oda Mae Brown, but there is a more sinister self-interested sort of medium called The Crow Man. Thankfully the protagonist is also much more interesting than the blandly good, pretty boy Sam Wheat. Maali Almeida documents atrocities of war and wants tyrants to be held accountable but he is not virtuous. From page one it states that if he had a business card it'd say: “Maali Almeida: Photographer. Gambler. Slut.” He accepts work from shady organizations, loses a lot of his money at a casino and sleeps around with many men behind his (secret) partner DD's back. What's more he's disillusioned with the government and doesn't attach himself to any particular political organization in Sri Lanka which is heavily embroiled in a deadly civil war during the late 80s when this novel is set. Because of all his complexity and so-called “flaws”, I fell in love with this character.
At the start of the book Maali wakes to find himself in the liminal space between life and the great beyond. Just like we can't recall birth, he can't recall his death. He's instructed by an official that he has seven moons to decide whether he wants to enter the light or remain as a spectre amongst the living. A countdown begins during which he wants to discover his killer, reconnect with those he loves and reveal to the public shocking evidence of a national scandal. It's satisfying reading a novel built around a certain structure that moves towards a definite ending and the suspenseful way in which this story unravels makes it thrilling to reach the conclusion. We gradually discover details of his life through people he “haunts”, but he also encounters many of the dead victims he got paid for photographing. In addition to those who were actively killed there are the ghosts of those who found life in Sri Lanka untenable and committed suicide. These spirits are raging. There is a tension between those who want to get their revenge and the desire to leave all the pain of life behind.
Watch my full review video discussing this novel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCRGvX7X8YY
I was lucky enough to attend this year's Booker Prize ceremony. You can watch my vlog of the event here (during which I chat with Shehan before the announcement and attend the press conference with him after he's won the prize): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMeaGY-hefA
At the start of the book Maali wakes to find himself in the liminal space between life and the great beyond. Just like we can't recall birth, he can't recall his death. He's instructed by an official that he has seven moons to decide whether he wants to enter the light or remain as a spectre amongst the living. A countdown begins during which he wants to discover his killer, reconnect with those he loves and reveal to the public shocking evidence of a national scandal. It's satisfying reading a novel built around a certain structure that moves towards a definite ending and the suspenseful way in which this story unravels makes it thrilling to reach the conclusion. We gradually discover details of his life through people he “haunts”, but he also encounters many of the dead victims he got paid for photographing. In addition to those who were actively killed there are the ghosts of those who found life in Sri Lanka untenable and committed suicide. These spirits are raging. There is a tension between those who want to get their revenge and the desire to leave all the pain of life behind.
Watch my full review video discussing this novel here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eCRGvX7X8YY
I was lucky enough to attend this year's Booker Prize ceremony. You can watch my vlog of the event here (during which I chat with Shehan before the announcement and attend the press conference with him after he's won the prize): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YMeaGY-hefA
October 17, 2022
Shehan Karunatilaka writes with a storyteller's flair, a talent for telling an engaging tale that is matched by the ambition of his latest novel. Originally published in 2020 as Chats with the Dead, the story is set in Colombo and follows Maali Almeida, a recently deceased war photographer who navigates the afterlife while reckoning with the ghosts that haunt his country. For a place like Sri Lanka, the past is never really dead. The U.N. has estimated 80,000 to 100,000 deaths tied to the Sri Lankan civil war, a shockingly high number of those being civilians. But this is no dour trip to Hades. The afterlife is at times a rather comic affair, drawing on Buddhist, Hindu, and other beliefs - with a splash of bureaucratic red tape that keeps the hereafter grounded in the here and now. Karunatilaka makes the wise choice to tell the story in the second person, Maali seemingly telling the tale to himself with a mix of sardonic wit and streetwise sensibility. Despite the heaviness of the subject matter, Karunatilaka's touch is light. After an exposition heavy first chapter and a sloggy middle, this turns into a cracking page turner, picking up steam as it goes, a whodunit wrapped in a morality play wrapped in a fantastically told story with compelling characters.
November 12, 2022
Winner of the 2022 Booker Prize.
4th in my longlist rankings (so firmly in my own shortlist) - my Bookstagram rating, ranking, summary review and Book themed Golden Retriever photo is here: https://www.instagram.com/p/ChNgZa_M4...
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Booker Prize – and it has a very strong thematic overlap with “The Trees” (in its treatment of retributive justice carried out by the victims of hate crimes and genocide) and “Glory” with its close examination of a turbulent political scene.
I would also describe it as “Lincoln In The Bardo” (with its treatment of a limbo style afterlife) meets “Passage North” (due to its treatment of the Sri Lankan civil war and due to the influence on both books and their authors of Channel 4’s Documentary “The Killing Fields”) with a dose of Arthur C Clarke (Sri Lanka’s greatest writer per the author of this novel and who once said “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living” for this is a novel about those ghosts).
This book was the final one of the longlist of 13 that I read (having read 9 pre-publication of the longlist in late July) and I finished it on 31 July. Hence I completed something I have always aimed for but never managed - reading the full Booker longlist by the end of July, something I achieved with more than just a glance through the covers but a detailed read and set of reviews, and an achievement which my twin brother (a left-armer with an unorthodox taste in books) once called the literary equivalent of 1000 runs by the end of May.
The cricket analogies in that previous sentence are deliberate as the author is best known for hugely successful best seller “The Chinaman” (2010) which used the lens of cricket – an unorthodox left-arm spinner and a drunk sports journalist - to examine Sri Lanka. That book was picked recently by the BBC as part of the Big Jubilee reads – the selection of 10 books from each decade of the Queen’s reign.
This book (or books) the author’s second novel – was 10 years in its conception, partly due to the success of “The Chinaman”, partly due to life events and partly as it took so long to coalesce into a coherent novel.
It was originally published in India in February 2020 by Penguin India as “Chats with the Dead” (note a publication 6 months earlier would have made it possibly Booker ineligible were it counted as the same book – and the two books have been merged on Goodreads). In the UK then book was then picked up by Sort of Books – a small independent publisher founded by the co-founders of the Rough Guide Travel Series (husband and wife team – Mark Ellingham and Natania Jansz) and whose first ever book the living-abroad memoir “Driving Over Lemons” was a huge bestseller and almost genre-defining book.
The author has said ……
Now I would say that the book still has a heavy dose of Sri Lankan politics and (particularly Hindu) mythology and at times can feel a little sprawling – but I never found it less than accessible and it has the pacing of a thriller so I think the edits worked.
The novel is set in Colombo in 1990 and features as its central character someone with birth name Malinda Albert Kabalana (born 1955) but who goes by the titular Maali Almeida, describes himself as “Photographer, Gambler. Slut”, who is also described by the author as a “hedonist, nihilist, atheist, closet gay” war photographer and who is partly inspired by a real life murdered Sri Lankan journalist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard... whose quote “Father forgive them for I will never” gives the book its first epigraph and also sets the scene for a novel which like “The Trees” looks at the quandy between vengeance (with its risk of self-perpetuation) and forgiveness (with its risk of an absence of justice).
Most crucially at the novel’s opening Maali finds out he is dead – and not just dead, but rather disconcertingly for a life long atheist, in some form of afterlife – albeit not a particularly attractive one.
The novel opens
For this is a novel written in the second person. The author has said
The afterlife in which Maali finds himself is partly a mash up of Buddhism (with the idea of an in-between Bardo), Catholicism (with a kind of purgatory with some form of prayers for the dead giving currency in the afterlife), Hinduism (with the in-between realm roved by malevolent spirits and in particular the destructive Mahakali who here consumes the souls of those dead not prepared to move on to the next stage of The Light) – but more than anything a chaotic bureaucracy staffed by white coated volunteers from among the dead and with any supreme being seemingly on an indefinite leave.
The first bureaucrat Maali meets – he suddenly recognises as Dr Ranee Sridharan – a Tamil university lecturer and campaigner, “slain by Tamil extremists for the crime of being a Tamil moderate”. She explains he has seven moons (seven days) in which to go through a number of stages - in particular an examination of his ear lobes to reveal the complexities of his life and the hindrances which might prevent him entering “The Light”.
But he is also approached by the black garbage bag wrapped ghost of Sena Pirantha – a JVP (a militant Communist body fighting a fierce war against the government) organiser. Sena claims that both he and Maali were victims of a hit squad including garbage men (a clean-up crew of body disposers with a sleeper Tamil agent driver), corrupt policemen, an army major, the chief torturer of the STF (Special Task Force who carry out abductions on suspected JVP or LTTE/Tamil Tiger members) and ultimately a government minister. Sena wants Maali to reject the promise of the light and instead join him in seeking vengeance on their murderers.
The book is effectively structured as a thriller/murder mystery with Maali trying to reconstruct the events that led to his violent death (which appears to have been caused when he was thrown of a tall building housing a casino that he frequently visited) and work out who killed him.
The range of potential killers is large as Maali lead a complex professional life – working as a war photographer (and part fixer) for a variety of different and often opposed groups including the army, some international journalists and an NGO. This murky role is made even more complicated by his suspicion that some of the journalists might be fronts for arms dealers, that the NGO may have links to the army and/or the LTTE and that the army and Tamil’s dealings are complicated both by the increasingly unwelcome presence to both of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) and the army’s willingness to deal with Tamil factions that might allow them to capture the LTTE Supreme Leader. Malli’s photos, a cache of which he keeps hidden from his clients, potentially expose these double dealings as well as the complicity of government ministers in past atrocities.
As an aside the book includes a helpful guide that Maali wrote to a fellow journalist explaining these groups and more and which ends “Don’t try and look for the good guys, ‘cause there ain’t none”.
And Maali’s personal life is as duplicitous and complex as his professional one. He shares a house with Jaki and her cousin Dilan (DD). Dilan is the son of the only Tamil minister in the government. Jaki is ostensibly Maali’s girlfriend, but they are not sexually or romantically involved (despite her seeming wishes) and instead Maali has a hidden sexual relationship with DD (hidden from Jaki to avoid unsetting her and from DD’s father as homosexuality is still largely taboo) while also carrying out a string of casual sexual encounters with men (which are in turn hidden from DD).
Now Maali needs Jaki and DD to find his hidden cache of photos, ones he has always intended to publish in exile but not wants to publish in exile from life – but that risks exposing them to severe danger and him to discovery of the duplicity in his personal life.
The author comes up with an imaginative way of allowing Maali to be both omnipresent but also close to the opposite of omnipotent as he navigates a Colombo which is both the living version and the one occupied by ghosts, which given the violence which has racked Sri Lanka is even more relatively populous than Arthur C Clarke’s quote would employ and of ghosts tormented by the natures of their deaths and lives.
Ghosts in this afterlife can travel wherever their dead body has been (allowing him to trace the grisly disposal of his body) and wherever their name is posthumously mentioned (allowing him and us to travel instantaneously around the various conflicted protagonists involved, implicated on interested in his disappearance at the precise moments they are discussing him).
However the ability of the dead to influence the living is restricted either to (the official approach urged by Dr Ranee) inserting themselves in dreams (this leads to a lovely King and Queen hint to the location of some critical negatives) or by more nefarious means which require involvement with the vengeful spirits which patrol the afterlife (as urged by Sena) – and Maali finds himself (perhaps not surprisingly given his professional and personal life) rather unsuccessfully playing both sides as he decides between moving on and vengeance in a plot which is never less than exuberant and fast moving.
Overall, this is a very striking book – one with a black humour which allows an unflinching look at the horrors of Civil War and one which fits really well on a very strong Booker longlist.
With thanks to the author’s publicity agent for an ARC.
4th in my longlist rankings (so firmly in my own shortlist) - my Bookstagram rating, ranking, summary review and Book themed Golden Retriever photo is here: https://www.instagram.com/p/ChNgZa_M4...
You were born before Elvis had his first hit. And died before Freddie had his last. In the interim, you have shot thousands. You have photos of the government Minister who looked on while the savages of '83 torched Tamil homes and slaughtered the occupants. You have portraits of disappeared journalists and vanished activists, bound and gagged and dead in custody. You have grainy yet identifiable snaps of an army major, a Tiger colonel, and a British arms dealer at the same table, sharing a jug of king coconut …………… If you could, you would make a thousand copies of each photo and paste them all over Colombo. Perhaps you still can.
I read this book due to its longlisting for the 2022 Booker Prize – and it has a very strong thematic overlap with “The Trees” (in its treatment of retributive justice carried out by the victims of hate crimes and genocide) and “Glory” with its close examination of a turbulent political scene.
I would also describe it as “Lincoln In The Bardo” (with its treatment of a limbo style afterlife) meets “Passage North” (due to its treatment of the Sri Lankan civil war and due to the influence on both books and their authors of Channel 4’s Documentary “The Killing Fields”) with a dose of Arthur C Clarke (Sri Lanka’s greatest writer per the author of this novel and who once said “Behind every man now alive stand thirty ghosts, for that is the ratio by which the dead outnumber the living” for this is a novel about those ghosts).
This book was the final one of the longlist of 13 that I read (having read 9 pre-publication of the longlist in late July) and I finished it on 31 July. Hence I completed something I have always aimed for but never managed - reading the full Booker longlist by the end of July, something I achieved with more than just a glance through the covers but a detailed read and set of reviews, and an achievement which my twin brother (a left-armer with an unorthodox taste in books) once called the literary equivalent of 1000 runs by the end of May.
The cricket analogies in that previous sentence are deliberate as the author is best known for hugely successful best seller “The Chinaman” (2010) which used the lens of cricket – an unorthodox left-arm spinner and a drunk sports journalist - to examine Sri Lanka. That book was picked recently by the BBC as part of the Big Jubilee reads – the selection of 10 books from each decade of the Queen’s reign.
This book (or books) the author’s second novel – was 10 years in its conception, partly due to the success of “The Chinaman”, partly due to life events and partly as it took so long to coalesce into a coherent novel.
It was originally published in India in February 2020 by Penguin India as “Chats with the Dead” (note a publication 6 months earlier would have made it possibly Booker ineligible were it counted as the same book – and the two books have been merged on Goodreads). In the UK then book was then picked up by Sort of Books – a small independent publisher founded by the co-founders of the Rough Guide Travel Series (husband and wife team – Mark Ellingham and Natania Jansz) and whose first ever book the living-abroad memoir “Driving Over Lemons” was a huge bestseller and almost genre-defining book.
The author has said ……
The initial manuscript got a great response from Indian publishers, but seemed to baffle the international ones. Many found the quagmire of Sri Lankan politics in 1989 too hard to follow, and the local mythology perplexing. What began as simple tweaks and edits for clarity, turned into more extensive revisions and rewrites. Penguin India were happy with the book and keen to launch it at the Jaipur Festival, and did so. But Natania and I ended up editing the novel all through the pandemic as our publishing dates kept getting pushed back. It’s the same story in spirit (ha!), with roughly the same characters, but with a few subplots revised. The new version is perhaps tighter, pacier, more textured and nuanced, and hopefully more accessible to a wider audience
Now I would say that the book still has a heavy dose of Sri Lankan politics and (particularly Hindu) mythology and at times can feel a little sprawling – but I never found it less than accessible and it has the pacing of a thriller so I think the edits worked.
The novel is set in Colombo in 1990 and features as its central character someone with birth name Malinda Albert Kabalana (born 1955) but who goes by the titular Maali Almeida, describes himself as “Photographer, Gambler. Slut”, who is also described by the author as a “hedonist, nihilist, atheist, closet gay” war photographer and who is partly inspired by a real life murdered Sri Lankan journalist (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard... whose quote “Father forgive them for I will never” gives the book its first epigraph and also sets the scene for a novel which like “The Trees” looks at the quandy between vengeance (with its risk of self-perpetuation) and forgiveness (with its risk of an absence of justice).
Most crucially at the novel’s opening Maali finds out he is dead – and not just dead, but rather disconcertingly for a life long atheist, in some form of afterlife – albeit not a particularly attractive one.
The novel opens
“You wake up with the answer to the question that everyone has. The answer is Yes, and the answer is Just Like Here But Worse”.
For this is a novel written in the second person. The author has said
[Originally] I wrote it in the first person, but I just found it hard to separate his voice from mine and so on, and then I just looked at it technically. When the body dies, what survives death? What is the soul? Is it breath? And I just came to the conclusion that what survives is the voice in your head. And mine is in the second person, it’s always ‘you, you, you’. So when I took that on the book started moving forward, so it worked from a philosophical point of view but also stylistically. And he questions it, ‘does the voice belong to me, or are there ghosts whispering in my ear?’
The afterlife in which Maali finds himself is partly a mash up of Buddhism (with the idea of an in-between Bardo), Catholicism (with a kind of purgatory with some form of prayers for the dead giving currency in the afterlife), Hinduism (with the in-between realm roved by malevolent spirits and in particular the destructive Mahakali who here consumes the souls of those dead not prepared to move on to the next stage of The Light) – but more than anything a chaotic bureaucracy staffed by white coated volunteers from among the dead and with any supreme being seemingly on an indefinite leave.
The first bureaucrat Maali meets – he suddenly recognises as Dr Ranee Sridharan – a Tamil university lecturer and campaigner, “slain by Tamil extremists for the crime of being a Tamil moderate”. She explains he has seven moons (seven days) in which to go through a number of stages - in particular an examination of his ear lobes to reveal the complexities of his life and the hindrances which might prevent him entering “The Light”.
But he is also approached by the black garbage bag wrapped ghost of Sena Pirantha – a JVP (a militant Communist body fighting a fierce war against the government) organiser. Sena claims that both he and Maali were victims of a hit squad including garbage men (a clean-up crew of body disposers with a sleeper Tamil agent driver), corrupt policemen, an army major, the chief torturer of the STF (Special Task Force who carry out abductions on suspected JVP or LTTE/Tamil Tiger members) and ultimately a government minister. Sena wants Maali to reject the promise of the light and instead join him in seeking vengeance on their murderers.
The book is effectively structured as a thriller/murder mystery with Maali trying to reconstruct the events that led to his violent death (which appears to have been caused when he was thrown of a tall building housing a casino that he frequently visited) and work out who killed him.
The range of potential killers is large as Maali lead a complex professional life – working as a war photographer (and part fixer) for a variety of different and often opposed groups including the army, some international journalists and an NGO. This murky role is made even more complicated by his suspicion that some of the journalists might be fronts for arms dealers, that the NGO may have links to the army and/or the LTTE and that the army and Tamil’s dealings are complicated both by the increasingly unwelcome presence to both of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF) and the army’s willingness to deal with Tamil factions that might allow them to capture the LTTE Supreme Leader. Malli’s photos, a cache of which he keeps hidden from his clients, potentially expose these double dealings as well as the complicity of government ministers in past atrocities.
As an aside the book includes a helpful guide that Maali wrote to a fellow journalist explaining these groups and more and which ends “Don’t try and look for the good guys, ‘cause there ain’t none”.
And Maali’s personal life is as duplicitous and complex as his professional one. He shares a house with Jaki and her cousin Dilan (DD). Dilan is the son of the only Tamil minister in the government. Jaki is ostensibly Maali’s girlfriend, but they are not sexually or romantically involved (despite her seeming wishes) and instead Maali has a hidden sexual relationship with DD (hidden from Jaki to avoid unsetting her and from DD’s father as homosexuality is still largely taboo) while also carrying out a string of casual sexual encounters with men (which are in turn hidden from DD).
Now Maali needs Jaki and DD to find his hidden cache of photos, ones he has always intended to publish in exile but not wants to publish in exile from life – but that risks exposing them to severe danger and him to discovery of the duplicity in his personal life.
The author comes up with an imaginative way of allowing Maali to be both omnipresent but also close to the opposite of omnipotent as he navigates a Colombo which is both the living version and the one occupied by ghosts, which given the violence which has racked Sri Lanka is even more relatively populous than Arthur C Clarke’s quote would employ and of ghosts tormented by the natures of their deaths and lives.
Ghosts in this afterlife can travel wherever their dead body has been (allowing him to trace the grisly disposal of his body) and wherever their name is posthumously mentioned (allowing him and us to travel instantaneously around the various conflicted protagonists involved, implicated on interested in his disappearance at the precise moments they are discussing him).
However the ability of the dead to influence the living is restricted either to (the official approach urged by Dr Ranee) inserting themselves in dreams (this leads to a lovely King and Queen hint to the location of some critical negatives) or by more nefarious means which require involvement with the vengeful spirits which patrol the afterlife (as urged by Sena) – and Maali finds himself (perhaps not surprisingly given his professional and personal life) rather unsuccessfully playing both sides as he decides between moving on and vengeance in a plot which is never less than exuberant and fast moving.
Overall, this is a very striking book – one with a black humour which allows an unflinching look at the horrors of Civil War and one which fits really well on a very strong Booker longlist.
With thanks to the author’s publicity agent for an ARC.
All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair. Many get luck, and many get misery. Many are born to homes with books, many grow up in the swamps of war. In the end, all becomes dust. All stories conclude with a fade to black.
July 5, 2023
“La storia è fatta di gente con le navi e le armi che spazza via quelle che si sono dimenticati di inventarle. Ogni civiltà inizia con un genocidio. È la regola dell’universo. La legge immutabile della giungla: anche di questa, fatta di cemento. Lo si legge nel movimento delle stelle e nella danza di ogni atomo. Il ricco schiavizzerà il povero. Il forte schiaccerà il debole”.
Negli anni 90 a Colombo, Sri Lanka, la vita non era semplice, specialmente per un fotografo di guerra, segretamente omosessuale, ludopatico e incapace di schierarsi tra le fazioni di un conflitto civile con ripercussioni internazionali. Figuriamoci poi se si è morti. Sì, il protagonista di questo romanzo si risveglia come fantasma. Dovrà scoprire chi l’ha ucciso e come scappare da alcuni problemini tipici dell’aldilà (come demoni e fanatici politici in cerca di vendetta) e ha solo sette notti per risolvere l’enigma. L’intreccio è assolutamente ciò che promette: un’indagine satirica e fantastica in un mondo popolato da personalità eccentriche e senza scrupoli e divinità capricciose. Un intreccio scoppiettante, accelerato dall’uso sapiente della seconda persona e dal tempo presente che garantisce immediatezza e agilità al racconto. Le pagine traboccano di storia, religione, mitologia e politica. Un pastiche che mescola una storia d’amore anticonvenzionale, una detective story sotto acidi, un thriller politico e una riflessione malinconica sui tanti modi in cui la vita ti delude e ti riduce a brandelli il cuore ma alla fine ne sarà sempre valsa la pena.
Come nel realismo magico di Rushdie e nel surrealismo di Bulgakov, è la fantasia l’arma più potente contro la violenza e la censura di un regime. Nonostante il resoconto magmatico di un Paese stremato, Karunatilaka ci ipnotizza con qualcosa di molto più potente: esistenze così intense da proseguire nell’aldilà, sogni così lucidi da rimanere impressi nella mente di altri, sussurri che si riescono a sentire tra un mondo e l’altro. Un turbinio di immagini, una meta-narrazione esuberante, infarcita di reincarnazioni, demoni, spettri, veggenti e visioni di ogni tipo. La letteratura è questo: una storia sopra un’altra storia, sotto un’altra storia ecc…
Negli anni 90 a Colombo, Sri Lanka, la vita non era semplice, specialmente per un fotografo di guerra, segretamente omosessuale, ludopatico e incapace di schierarsi tra le fazioni di un conflitto civile con ripercussioni internazionali. Figuriamoci poi se si è morti. Sì, il protagonista di questo romanzo si risveglia come fantasma. Dovrà scoprire chi l’ha ucciso e come scappare da alcuni problemini tipici dell’aldilà (come demoni e fanatici politici in cerca di vendetta) e ha solo sette notti per risolvere l’enigma. L’intreccio è assolutamente ciò che promette: un’indagine satirica e fantastica in un mondo popolato da personalità eccentriche e senza scrupoli e divinità capricciose. Un intreccio scoppiettante, accelerato dall’uso sapiente della seconda persona e dal tempo presente che garantisce immediatezza e agilità al racconto. Le pagine traboccano di storia, religione, mitologia e politica. Un pastiche che mescola una storia d’amore anticonvenzionale, una detective story sotto acidi, un thriller politico e una riflessione malinconica sui tanti modi in cui la vita ti delude e ti riduce a brandelli il cuore ma alla fine ne sarà sempre valsa la pena.
Come nel realismo magico di Rushdie e nel surrealismo di Bulgakov, è la fantasia l’arma più potente contro la violenza e la censura di un regime. Nonostante il resoconto magmatico di un Paese stremato, Karunatilaka ci ipnotizza con qualcosa di molto più potente: esistenze così intense da proseguire nell’aldilà, sogni così lucidi da rimanere impressi nella mente di altri, sussurri che si riescono a sentire tra un mondo e l’altro. Un turbinio di immagini, una meta-narrazione esuberante, infarcita di reincarnazioni, demoni, spettri, veggenti e visioni di ogni tipo. La letteratura è questo: una storia sopra un’altra storia, sotto un’altra storia ecc…
Shelved as 'paused'
October 18, 2022Congratulations to the author for winning the Booker prize last night. I was 90% sure this novel will win and I only read 50 pages. That was one of the reasons I paused my reading. I was not in the right mood to fully appreciate its value. If you like humor with your drama, which I do, read this. If you loved Th Trees, it is quite similar in style.
I am pausing this at 14% until the audiobook comes out on 1st of December. I have a feeling it would work very well on that format. I know it’s after the Booker winner is announced but that’s fine.
I am pausing this at 14% until the audiobook comes out on 1st of December. I have a feeling it would work very well on that format. I know it’s after the Booker winner is announced but that’s fine.
January 13, 2023
In a Nutshell: A stark look at the political and social situation in late 1980s Sri Lanka but in a satirical-cum-fantastical packaging. After a long time, I found a Booker winner that focusses on plot progression as much as writing flourishes. Worth a read even for those wary of such award winners. (Just in case it’s still not clear, I am not a Booker winner fan.)
Story Synopsis:
Where the book worked for me:
😍 The innovative storyline. The story is a potent mix of satire, historical fiction, dark humour and low fantasy, with an LGBTQ+ track as well. Yet it didn’t seem overpowering. Imagine political corruption and folklore fitting seamlessly into a single plot! The humour helps balance out the savagery.
😍 The attention to detail. Every character and every scene was sketched well. Terms that might be new to readers were explained in a quirky way without making them seem like newspaper articles or dictionary definitions. I found it easy to navigate through this book despite not being much aware of local Sri Lankan politics. (The book is politically intensive.)
😍 The authentic feel. Shehan Karunatilaka seems to know his country in and out, and it reflects in the writing. The ethos and the pathos of Sri Lanka both appear to have been captured well. (Only a Sri Lankan would be able to comment on the accuracy though.)
😍 The second person voice is the toughest one to get right. But the author handles this excellently. Not once did I feel like the voice was erroneously applied. Whether flashbacks or contemporary time, whether the divine office or ‘Down There’, the second person is put to effective use in making us feel like a part of the plot.
Where the book could have worked better for me:
😔 With too many characters, a complicated plot, and convoluted timelines, the content felt a bit overwhelming. This problem wouldn’t have occurred if I were reading this instead of listening to it.
😔 The mystery about Maali’s cause of death and its subsequent resolution wasn’t satisfying. The revelation felt almost anti-climactic after all the build-up.
😔 A couple of the “moons” feel very repetitive. The middle section of the story drags a bit.
The audiobook experience:
The audiobook, clocking at 14 hrs 15 min, is narrated by Shivantha Wijesinha. He was brilliant! Despite the vast number of characters in the plot, he narrates them each with aplomb, using a distinctive speaking style based on the nationality of the characters. His way of saying ���Aiyyoooo!” has percolated into my vocabulary as well. 😄
However, despite the fantastic narrator, I have a strong feeling that I would have liked this book even better had I read it. It would have been much easier to keep track of the moons and the people.
Basically, like almost every Booker winner, this too is a character-oriented novel. If you don’t enjoy character-driven literary fiction, this won’t work for you. However, to lit-fic readers, this novel will come as a fresh voice offering a perspective on a topic not commonly seen in fiction.
Recommended for sure but to a specific set of readers.
4 stars.
My thanks to HighBridge Audio and NetGalley for the ALC of “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook.
Trigger: It is a book about a war photographer’s experiences. Think every trigger related to war, and you will find it in this book. It is not for the faint-hearted.
———————————————
Connect with me through:
My Blog | The StoryGraph | Facebook | Twitter
Story Synopsis:
1990, Colombo. Maali Almeida – war photographer, gambler, and closet homosexual – is dead. He doesn’t know how he died, when or where he died, or even if someone killed him. After all, his job puts him into regular skirmishes with the various factions , both legal and illegal, governing over Sri Lanka. All Maali knows is that he is in some kind of divine administrative building that processes dead souls. He is told that he has seven moons to set his affairs in order before he needs to walk towards the light. There’s just one thing that Maali wants to do – lead the two people he loves most towards a hidden stash of controversial photographs.
The story comes to us written in the second person, addressed to Maali.
Where the book worked for me:
😍 The innovative storyline. The story is a potent mix of satire, historical fiction, dark humour and low fantasy, with an LGBTQ+ track as well. Yet it didn’t seem overpowering. Imagine political corruption and folklore fitting seamlessly into a single plot! The humour helps balance out the savagery.
😍 The attention to detail. Every character and every scene was sketched well. Terms that might be new to readers were explained in a quirky way without making them seem like newspaper articles or dictionary definitions. I found it easy to navigate through this book despite not being much aware of local Sri Lankan politics. (The book is politically intensive.)
😍 The authentic feel. Shehan Karunatilaka seems to know his country in and out, and it reflects in the writing. The ethos and the pathos of Sri Lanka both appear to have been captured well. (Only a Sri Lankan would be able to comment on the accuracy though.)
😍 The second person voice is the toughest one to get right. But the author handles this excellently. Not once did I feel like the voice was erroneously applied. Whether flashbacks or contemporary time, whether the divine office or ‘Down There’, the second person is put to effective use in making us feel like a part of the plot.
Where the book could have worked better for me:
😔 With too many characters, a complicated plot, and convoluted timelines, the content felt a bit overwhelming. This problem wouldn’t have occurred if I were reading this instead of listening to it.
😔 The mystery about Maali’s cause of death and its subsequent resolution wasn’t satisfying. The revelation felt almost anti-climactic after all the build-up.
😔 A couple of the “moons” feel very repetitive. The middle section of the story drags a bit.
The audiobook experience:
The audiobook, clocking at 14 hrs 15 min, is narrated by Shivantha Wijesinha. He was brilliant! Despite the vast number of characters in the plot, he narrates them each with aplomb, using a distinctive speaking style based on the nationality of the characters. His way of saying ���Aiyyoooo!” has percolated into my vocabulary as well. 😄
However, despite the fantastic narrator, I have a strong feeling that I would have liked this book even better had I read it. It would have been much easier to keep track of the moons and the people.
Basically, like almost every Booker winner, this too is a character-oriented novel. If you don’t enjoy character-driven literary fiction, this won’t work for you. However, to lit-fic readers, this novel will come as a fresh voice offering a perspective on a topic not commonly seen in fiction.
Recommended for sure but to a specific set of readers.
4 stars.
My thanks to HighBridge Audio and NetGalley for the ALC of “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida”. This review is voluntary and contains my honest opinion about the audiobook.
Trigger: It is a book about a war photographer’s experiences. Think every trigger related to war, and you will find it in this book. It is not for the faint-hearted.
———————————————
Connect with me through:
My Blog | The StoryGraph | Facebook | Twitter
September 28, 2022
If I were going strictly on enjoyment of this book, my rating would be a one, but I will give the author kudos for excellent use of the second person - - a voice I happen to enjoy.
But other than that, I was not a fan.
I don't know much about Sri Lanka, but my impressions from this book are entirely negative - corrupt, homophobic, violent, backward, awful. Then, overlay this backdrop with a quasi mystery aka "who killed Maali Almeida?" and a B-movie plot about who possesses Maali's photograph negatives (does anyone under the age of 40 even know what negatives are anymore?). If that isn't bad enough, Maali is in some kind of purgatory, where the main facets seem to be that ghostly beings ride on the wind and only a VERY select number of beings know how to communicate with the living. It's a bit beyond me why Maali is so invested in the lives of his two friends when he is now aware there's a whole big afterlife in the event they do die. In fact, everyone's motives in this entire book seem somewhat unbelievable.
This book is peppered with minor characters to the point where it's hard for the reader to keep them straight or care about any of them. There's also a repetitiveness about the text that didn't make the plot any easier or more fun to follow. I could have done with like 5 less moons to tell this story and 100 fewer pages.
To be fair, I really dislike magical realism, and I never should have read this book. Bet you it wins the Booker Prize. It's almost inevitable.
But other than that, I was not a fan.
I don't know much about Sri Lanka, but my impressions from this book are entirely negative - corrupt, homophobic, violent, backward, awful. Then, overlay this backdrop with a quasi mystery aka "who killed Maali Almeida?" and a B-movie plot about who possesses Maali's photograph negatives (does anyone under the age of 40 even know what negatives are anymore?). If that isn't bad enough, Maali is in some kind of purgatory, where the main facets seem to be that ghostly beings ride on the wind and only a VERY select number of beings know how to communicate with the living. It's a bit beyond me why Maali is so invested in the lives of his two friends when he is now aware there's a whole big afterlife in the event they do die. In fact, everyone's motives in this entire book seem somewhat unbelievable.
This book is peppered with minor characters to the point where it's hard for the reader to keep them straight or care about any of them. There's also a repetitiveness about the text that didn't make the plot any easier or more fun to follow. I could have done with like 5 less moons to tell this story and 100 fewer pages.
To be fair, I really dislike magical realism, and I never should have read this book. Bet you it wins the Booker Prize. It's almost inevitable.
February 20, 2023
Starting from an afterlife as a bureaucratic waiting room, we follow a gambler, cheater, and closeted gay photographer in his a quest to find a semblance of justice. I enjoyed learning about Sri Lankan history but this could have been executed more tight
If there is a heavenly father he must be like your father, absent, lazy and possibly evil
Reading this book reminded me of fellow Booker prize authors Human Acts of Han Kang and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World of Elif Shafak in how trauma and violence in the country’s history are interwoven in a story of ghosts. I found The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida mostly an engaging read, but at times was a bit confused about side characters popping up and at times even bored, despite the high stakes inherent to the setup of the book, taking place over 7 nights.
The afterlife an eternal waiting room is something that forms a nasty surprise to Malinda Albert Kabalana aka Maali Almeida. Early on Shehan Karunatilaka defines the protagonist as: Photographer. Gambler. Slut.
Importance of relationships and knowing people in power very soon becomes important, both in the afterworld, where Maali is approached by shadowy forces and especially in the real world. Here NGOs, friends, family, government and Tamil forces fight over potentially explosive pictures left by Maali. Against the light and the forgetting is a slogan in the afterworld, which interestingly enough has a completely reversed moral alignment in the alternating real world.
Maali Almeida, as a gay journalist with a double, or even triple life, narrates the the fractious, violent history of Sri Lanka merges with the afterlife skilfully. He leaves behind DD, his rich and clandestine boyfriend, who together with the false relationship Jacki, a girl Maali lived with to hide his sexuality, start to unearth the circumstances leading to Maali his demise.
To tell more is to reveal to much, but the quest leads to observations on gay subculture (men like us are allies. Maali and DD were characters I found well sketched, but the side characters are in my view rather underdeveloped, I completely forgot about one being a news anchor until it suddenly pops up halfway.
The circumstances are grim, people are literally disposed of by garbage men, there are curfews and secret torture/detention centres no-one returns from. At times this felt like reading about Vietnam in The Quiet American by Graham Greene: everyone has double agenda's. Still there is a remarkable heart at the end of the book, making this a less dark read than one might expect, following a dead gay photo journalist in a war-torn country: And, without a doubt, that is the kindest thing you can say about life. It’s not nothing.
Three and a half stars, rounded down.
Quotes - the author has a real knack for snappy, nicely formed sentences
It will make you promises and it will not keep them.
Sounds like ever boy I ever kissed, you think, but don’t say.
To witness but never record
Follow any turd upstream and it leads to a member of parliament
Rich and poor are all the same before the law.
That’s a good joke.
The afterlife is a tax office, and everyone wants their rebate
Hell is all around you and in session as we speak
Most political murders have nothing to do with politics
I was in the wrong place holding a camera.
Is that your slogan?
The photos I don’t take are the best
We protect the innocent.
I thought we protected the powerful.
People will believe anything except the truth
History is people with ships and weapons wiping out people who forgot to invent them. Every civilization begins with a genocide. Its the rule of the universe. The immutable rule of the jungle, even this one made of concrete.
Does every minister have a demon?
Only the very best.
It’s difficult to know God’s face if you don’t even know your own
All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair.
Being a ghost isn’t that different to being a war photographer. Long periods of boredom interspersed with short bursts of terror.
I was not religious but I was a believer
Laws are written by men, you say, who don’t mind bad things happening to people that are not them
Tell her the universe is nothing than mathematics and probabilities. That we are nothing more than the accidents of our birth.
If you call again I will massacre you
If you are old enough to kill you are old enough to die
This unit will be apolitical.
Nothing in this country is apolitical.
I came to help the Tamil people. My corpse won’t help anyone.
Don’t be afraid of demons, it is the living we should fear.
We are garbage men, we don’t make garbage, we just clean it up
We must all find pointless causes to live for, or why bother with breath?
Only normal life has a chance of success
There is no animal more savage than a human.
Of that I have no doubt, but most evil can be cleansed from within.
If there is a heavenly father he must be like your father, absent, lazy and possibly evil
Reading this book reminded me of fellow Booker prize authors Human Acts of Han Kang and 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World of Elif Shafak in how trauma and violence in the country’s history are interwoven in a story of ghosts. I found The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida mostly an engaging read, but at times was a bit confused about side characters popping up and at times even bored, despite the high stakes inherent to the setup of the book, taking place over 7 nights.
The afterlife an eternal waiting room is something that forms a nasty surprise to Malinda Albert Kabalana aka Maali Almeida. Early on Shehan Karunatilaka defines the protagonist as: Photographer. Gambler. Slut.
Importance of relationships and knowing people in power very soon becomes important, both in the afterworld, where Maali is approached by shadowy forces and especially in the real world. Here NGOs, friends, family, government and Tamil forces fight over potentially explosive pictures left by Maali. Against the light and the forgetting is a slogan in the afterworld, which interestingly enough has a completely reversed moral alignment in the alternating real world.
Maali Almeida, as a gay journalist with a double, or even triple life, narrates the the fractious, violent history of Sri Lanka merges with the afterlife skilfully. He leaves behind DD, his rich and clandestine boyfriend, who together with the false relationship Jacki, a girl Maali lived with to hide his sexuality, start to unearth the circumstances leading to Maali his demise.
To tell more is to reveal to much, but the quest leads to observations on gay subculture (men like us are allies. Maali and DD were characters I found well sketched, but the side characters are in my view rather underdeveloped, I completely forgot about one being a news anchor until it suddenly pops up halfway.
The circumstances are grim, people are literally disposed of by garbage men, there are curfews and secret torture/detention centres no-one returns from. At times this felt like reading about Vietnam in The Quiet American by Graham Greene: everyone has double agenda's. Still there is a remarkable heart at the end of the book, making this a less dark read than one might expect, following a dead gay photo journalist in a war-torn country: And, without a doubt, that is the kindest thing you can say about life. It’s not nothing.
Three and a half stars, rounded down.
Quotes - the author has a real knack for snappy, nicely formed sentences
It will make you promises and it will not keep them.
Sounds like ever boy I ever kissed, you think, but don’t say.
To witness but never record
Follow any turd upstream and it leads to a member of parliament
Rich and poor are all the same before the law.
That’s a good joke.
The afterlife is a tax office, and everyone wants their rebate
Hell is all around you and in session as we speak
Most political murders have nothing to do with politics
I was in the wrong place holding a camera.
Is that your slogan?
The photos I don’t take are the best
We protect the innocent.
I thought we protected the powerful.
People will believe anything except the truth
History is people with ships and weapons wiping out people who forgot to invent them. Every civilization begins with a genocide. Its the rule of the universe. The immutable rule of the jungle, even this one made of concrete.
Does every minister have a demon?
Only the very best.
It’s difficult to know God’s face if you don’t even know your own
All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair.
Being a ghost isn’t that different to being a war photographer. Long periods of boredom interspersed with short bursts of terror.
I was not religious but I was a believer
Laws are written by men, you say, who don’t mind bad things happening to people that are not them
Tell her the universe is nothing than mathematics and probabilities. That we are nothing more than the accidents of our birth.
If you call again I will massacre you
If you are old enough to kill you are old enough to die
This unit will be apolitical.
Nothing in this country is apolitical.
I came to help the Tamil people. My corpse won’t help anyone.
Don’t be afraid of demons, it is the living we should fear.
We are garbage men, we don’t make garbage, we just clean it up
We must all find pointless causes to live for, or why bother with breath?
Only normal life has a chance of success
There is no animal more savage than a human.
Of that I have no doubt, but most evil can be cleansed from within.
September 18, 2022
This had a really cool concept but the execution didn’t work for me. There was a lot going on and so many characters and elements that never really came together cohesively. It felt a bit dragged out too. If it had been a shorter, more character driven story rather than something with so much plot, I might’ve enjoyed it more. Not bad but not particularly memorable either.
April 19, 2023
Now the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize
Admittedly, when this made the longlist for the Booker prize, I wasn't very interested in reading it. Somewhere between the shortlist announcement and it being available on Kindle for less than $8, though, I said what the heck and jumped right in. I'm so glad I took that chance as this is nothing short of brilliant.
At the beginning, I was a bit unsure of where it was going, and I will admit that it can be a bit hard to follow at times, but you know what? Sometimes, when reading, you just need to pay attention. If you're looking for an "easy read," then this might not be for you. With that said, I was highly entertained but also deeply moved, and by the end, my attention paid was more than rewarded.
So what's it about? It's about Sri Lanka and political corruption. It's about life and death. It's about reality and metaphysics. Above all, it's about the title character, Maali Almeida. Our story begins with him in the afterlife; a place that, having grown up in a developing country myself, looked all too familiar to me with its bureaucratic red tape and jaded workers. He has no clue how he got there, he hasn't a clue that he's even dead. In its 400 pages, the book tries to piece together the who and the why, but from its very first page, it establishes that this is no ordinary ghost story. An apt description would be Beetlejuice if Salman Rushdie had written it- irreverent, hilarious, and more than a little creepy.
As I've said, this won't be a book the average reader will breeze through. It requires time, patience, and undivided attention. The story started off a little slow, but when it got going, I was hooked. In the hands of another, less capable writer, this could have been a mess. And you know what? As a hodgepodge of different genres, it probably is. As a satire told in a nonlinear style, though, that kinda feels like the point.
At the time of writing this, I wasn't yet done with Glory and I probably won't read Treacle Walker, so I may not be qualified to say if this was the most deserving winner of the Booker shortlist. I will say, though, that I'm so so glad it won. It's a daring piece of work, one that I will definitely be reading again. A long, funny, violent, macabre, engaging story. My sincerest gratitude to the Booker committee for introducing me to such an amazing writer.
Admittedly, when this made the longlist for the Booker prize, I wasn't very interested in reading it. Somewhere between the shortlist announcement and it being available on Kindle for less than $8, though, I said what the heck and jumped right in. I'm so glad I took that chance as this is nothing short of brilliant.
At the beginning, I was a bit unsure of where it was going, and I will admit that it can be a bit hard to follow at times, but you know what? Sometimes, when reading, you just need to pay attention. If you're looking for an "easy read," then this might not be for you. With that said, I was highly entertained but also deeply moved, and by the end, my attention paid was more than rewarded.
So what's it about? It's about Sri Lanka and political corruption. It's about life and death. It's about reality and metaphysics. Above all, it's about the title character, Maali Almeida. Our story begins with him in the afterlife; a place that, having grown up in a developing country myself, looked all too familiar to me with its bureaucratic red tape and jaded workers. He has no clue how he got there, he hasn't a clue that he's even dead. In its 400 pages, the book tries to piece together the who and the why, but from its very first page, it establishes that this is no ordinary ghost story. An apt description would be Beetlejuice if Salman Rushdie had written it- irreverent, hilarious, and more than a little creepy.
As I've said, this won't be a book the average reader will breeze through. It requires time, patience, and undivided attention. The story started off a little slow, but when it got going, I was hooked. In the hands of another, less capable writer, this could have been a mess. And you know what? As a hodgepodge of different genres, it probably is. As a satire told in a nonlinear style, though, that kinda feels like the point.
At the time of writing this, I wasn't yet done with Glory and I probably won't read Treacle Walker, so I may not be qualified to say if this was the most deserving winner of the Booker shortlist. I will say, though, that I'm so so glad it won. It's a daring piece of work, one that I will definitely be reading again. A long, funny, violent, macabre, engaging story. My sincerest gratitude to the Booker committee for introducing me to such an amazing writer.
November 1, 2022
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. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...
“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. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post
https://www.washingtonpost.com/books/...
October 8, 2022
A challenging read, that I decided to finish, so I can say I have completed the 2022 Booker shortlist.
Insert *big sigh*.
This had so much early potential. I was ready for a Sri Lankan Lincoln in the Bardo but having just read Saunders I can tell you the similarity ends with the ghosts.
This has three significant problems :
1. Too long. The consensus seems to be 200 pages or 3 moons too long
2. Repetitive and confusing. Why are so many phrases and incidences repeated? The situations in the photos are horrific yet the way this is all presented somehow detracts from the impact those stories should have had - which leads me to ...
3. Glib. While this is loaded with really interesting detail about the atrocities of the Sri Lankan civil war (see This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War) it seemed less able to navigate the lines between serious and humorous, ghost world and the real world, cartoon fantasy and doleful introspection.
In short, I was totally bamboozled by this.
Leave on a positive: Amazing cover design!
March 6, 2023
Book focusing on the tragic period of Sri Lanka's history, with ethnic cleansing and atrocities committed on all sides. One of the novels that leave a reader stunned with the intensity of cruelty that can be inflicted by humans. I can understand why this novel won the Author a high prize since his vision how to describe those unfathomable events is most original and allows for engaging reader to the full.
*A big thank-you to Shehan Karunatilaka, Bolinda Audio, and NetGalley for a free audiobook in exchange for my honest review*
*A big thank-you to Shehan Karunatilaka, Bolinda Audio, and NetGalley for a free audiobook in exchange for my honest review*
October 18, 2022
Now Winner of the Booker Prize 2022
Shehan Karunatilaka is one of Sri Lanka's most important authors. His novel "The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida" is a metaphysical thriller that not only breaks down genre boundaries, but even blurs the lines between life and death: The book begins with the protagonist waking up and realizing that he is dead. He has seven days to find out who murdered him and why. What follows is a philosophical, often humorous story about the brutal civil war in Sri Lanka, a conflict the dead protagonist, a gay photographer, has documented. This ambitious winning title is thus a novel against forgetting, and in his acceptance speech Karunatilaka expressed the hope that Sri Lanka would learn from the country's stories.
Told in the second person and dedicating one chapter to each of the seven moons (=days), we meet a plethora of characters and are confronted with tons of minor details and intricate mythological references - for me, this wasn't the most comfortable or fun read, but I applaud its ambition and imaginative force.
Comparing this year's Booker to its counterpart, the German Book Prize (which was actually modeled after the Booker), it has to be noted that the Booker longlist was a lot more ambitious and way less concerned about marketability, so I hope the German Book Prize will step up its game next year.
Shehan Karunatilaka is one of Sri Lanka's most important authors. His novel "The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida" is a metaphysical thriller that not only breaks down genre boundaries, but even blurs the lines between life and death: The book begins with the protagonist waking up and realizing that he is dead. He has seven days to find out who murdered him and why. What follows is a philosophical, often humorous story about the brutal civil war in Sri Lanka, a conflict the dead protagonist, a gay photographer, has documented. This ambitious winning title is thus a novel against forgetting, and in his acceptance speech Karunatilaka expressed the hope that Sri Lanka would learn from the country's stories.
Told in the second person and dedicating one chapter to each of the seven moons (=days), we meet a plethora of characters and are confronted with tons of minor details and intricate mythological references - for me, this wasn't the most comfortable or fun read, but I applaud its ambition and imaginative force.
Comparing this year's Booker to its counterpart, the German Book Prize (which was actually modeled after the Booker), it has to be noted that the Booker longlist was a lot more ambitious and way less concerned about marketability, so I hope the German Book Prize will step up its game next year.
October 21, 2022
Now 2022 Booker Prize Winner ... sadly...
AKA Chats with the Dead, and might as well have been called 'Maali in the Bardo ', this had somewhat the same effect on me as that earlier Booker winner that took place in the
afterlife. My tolerance for whimsical ghosts and musings on mortality is quite low, so this was never going to sit well with me.
But to compound that problem, one really needs to know (and care) about the history of Sri Lanka's civil war(s) to actually understand what is happening - and I was never invested enough in the storyline or characters to do even rudimentary Googling. And it's always annoying when every 17th word is not in the Kindle dictionary, so one has to either belabor oneself with more Googling - or just kinda/sorta guess what the words mean and move on (why, oh why, can't foreign authors provide glossaries and/or footnotes?!!).
Add to that the superfluity of characters, all with multisyllabic unpronounceable names and almost 400 pages which could have easily been chopped in half - and well, this sinks to the bottom tier in my Booker ratings. Amid the dross and drudgery though, there were some memorable scenes and a few chuckles, and I managed to get through it in 3 days, so a grudging 3 stars.
AKA Chats with the Dead, and might as well have been called 'Maali in the Bardo ', this had somewhat the same effect on me as that earlier Booker winner that took place in the
afterlife. My tolerance for whimsical ghosts and musings on mortality is quite low, so this was never going to sit well with me.
But to compound that problem, one really needs to know (and care) about the history of Sri Lanka's civil war(s) to actually understand what is happening - and I was never invested enough in the storyline or characters to do even rudimentary Googling. And it's always annoying when every 17th word is not in the Kindle dictionary, so one has to either belabor oneself with more Googling - or just kinda/sorta guess what the words mean and move on (why, oh why, can't foreign authors provide glossaries and/or footnotes?!!).
Add to that the superfluity of characters, all with multisyllabic unpronounceable names and almost 400 pages which could have easily been chopped in half - and well, this sinks to the bottom tier in my Booker ratings. Amid the dross and drudgery though, there were some memorable scenes and a few chuckles, and I managed to get through it in 3 days, so a grudging 3 stars.
Read
December 21, 2022Given my strongly unhappy reaction to this book I plan to read it again soon because anything that bothers me this much is probably not done with me yet.
December 31, 2022
Booker 2022 was a disappointment. So was this book. So let's keep it in 2022.
It's not like it doesn't have its qualities ( I liked the conclusion), but it's too long and the characters are unrealistic for Sri Lanka from 30 years ago. Today it is still illegal to be gay in Sri Lanka, so a character like Maali Almeida is a work of ( bad) fantasy.
It's not like it doesn't have its qualities ( I liked the conclusion), but it's too long and the characters are unrealistic for Sri Lanka from 30 years ago. Today it is still illegal to be gay in Sri Lanka, so a character like Maali Almeida is a work of ( bad) fantasy.
June 24, 2023
5★
“You have one response for those who believe Colombo to be overcrowded: wait till you see it with ghosts.”
Sri Lanka was once called Ceylon.
“‘Ceylon was a beautiful island before it filled up with savages.’
‘True. Some countries import their savages. We breed ours.’”
Beauty, savagery, and breeding are all part of this story of the brutal conflict in Sri Lanka in the 1980s, where people of so many groups fight for supremacy by exterminating each other. I can’t begin to understand all the politics, but I understand enough to know that your success depends on being born into the ‘right’ religious or ethnic or whatever group.
It is written in second person, which in this case, makes me feel as if I’m inside the story, which is a little unsettling, considering the company I’m keeping.
“ANSWERS
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.”
Maali Almeida wakes up, feeling weird and remembers the confusion he felt after an LSD trip. So he figures he must have had some of his friend Jaki’s ‘silly pills’ and is still coming down. He finds himself shouting at some woman in a white sari in a government office.
No, it’s not that. The people around him are peculiar, kind of fuzzy, funny colours, missing limbs, decidedly not normal.
“The woman opens a large register. She looks you up and down with neither interest nor scorn.
‘First must confirm details. Name?’
‘Malinda Albert Kabalana.’
‘One syllable, please.’
‘Maali.’
‘You know what a syllable is?’
‘Maal.’
‘Thank you. Religion?’
‘None.’
‘How silly. Cause of death?’
‘Don’t remember.’
‘Time since death?’
‘Don’t know.’”
Meanwhile, the people/creatures are swarming the counters with questions about their deaths.
“Lankans can’t queue. Unless you define a queue as an amorphous curve with multiple entry points.”
Maali is a photographer, especially of war zones and atrocities, collecting particular photos that he says will “bring down governments.” But they are in a box, under his bed, and while he can pass through walls, he can’t move his box, light as it is.
“The box is flimsy, made of paper that wants to be cardboard when it grows up. It houses five envelopes.”
So what now? It seems he is in a sort of holding pattern, bardo, limbo (underworld?), and he has seven moons, seven nights (not months) to try to contact Jaki (she of the ‘silly pills’) or his boyfriend, DD, to find the box and use the photos.
It also seems, that like everywhere else, there are tricks to learn, ways to manipulate circumstances – up to a point.
“You are getting the hang of riding winds, though you struggle to explain it to yourself. Like gravity is a bus that lets you hang on its footboards. Like holding your breath until your breath holds you. Like a magic carpet without the carpet bit. You float like a particle must do when it’s tipsy.
. . .
Sena’s garbage bag cape flutters behind him. He looks less like a superman and more like a broken umbrella.
. . .
‘Mara trees catch winds. Like radios catch frequencies. So do bo trees, banyan trees and probably any other big tree that blows wind.’
‘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.’
‘What are we doing here?’
‘If you quiet your mind, you may hear your name spoken. If you hear your name, you can go there. Do it while your corpse is fresh, so to speak. After ninety moons, no one will care about your Colombo 7 arse.’”
It’s a terrific ghost story, thriller, dark comedy, and political commentary that I was swept along with Maali. I certainly got lost in the politics, but for those who want a program, Maalli says he made a cheatsheet, a comprehensive list he put together for his friend Andy McGowan, from ‘Newsweek’, so that if readers wish to refer to it, they may. I am including it, because the summaries give such a good picture of what anyone in Sri Lanka was up against, day to day.
“ABBREVIATIONS
Dear Andy
To an outsider, the Sri Lankan tragedy will appear confusing and irreparable. It needn’t be either. Here are the main players.
LTTE – The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
* Want a separate Tamil state.
* Prepared to slaughter Tamil civilians and moderates to achieve this.
JVP – The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna
* Want to overthrow the capitalist state.
* Are willing to murder the working class while they liberate them.
UNP – The United National Party
* Known as the Uncle Nephew Party.
* In power since the late ’70s and embroiled in the above two wars.
STF – The Special Task Force
* On behalf of the Govt, will abduct and torture anyone suspected of being or abetting the LTTE or the JVP.
The nation divides into races, the races divide into factions and the factions turn on each other. Whoever is in the opposition will preach multiculturalism and then enforce Sinhala Buddhist dominance in exchange for power.
You are not the only outsider here, Andy. There are many others as confused as you are.
IPKF – The Indian Peace Keeping Force
* Sent by our neighbour to preserve peace.
* Are willing to burn villages to fulfil their mission.
UN – United Nations
* Have offices in Colombo.
* Are arseholes to work with.
RAW – Research and Analysis Wing
* Indian secret service, here to broker dodgy deals.
* Are best avoided.
CIA – Central Intelligence Agency
* Sits on the shores of the Diego Garcia islands, holding very powerful binoculars.
* Is this true, Andy? Say it ain’t so.
It’s not that complicated, my friend. Don’t try and look for the good guys ’cause there ain’t none. Everyone is proud and greedy and no one can resolve things without money changing hands or fists being raised.
Things have escalated beyond what anyone imagined and they keep getting worse and worse. Stay safe, Andy. These wars aren’t worth dying over. None of them are.”
The author reworked his original Chats with the Dead (which is now listed as just another edition of this book) for a western audience. The result is this magnificent, grisly, dark, satirical, unforgettable story that still has a warm heart hidden inside. It certainly earned its 2022 Booker Prize.
P.S. I particularly enjoyed reading in The Guardian that he loved the Choose Your Own Adventure stories when he was a youngster, and as a teen, he was greatly moved by Tim O'Brien’s Vietnam stories in The Things They Carried, which is a favourite of mine. The book he rereads, and which inspired this, is the one I reread as well, David Eagleman's imaginative Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, which he thinks should be compulsory reading in schools. (I agree.) So it’s no surprise that I connected so strongly with this one.
My review of Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
My review of The Things They Carried
“You have one response for those who believe Colombo to be overcrowded: wait till you see it with ghosts.”
Sri Lanka was once called Ceylon.
“‘Ceylon was a beautiful island before it filled up with savages.’
‘True. Some countries import their savages. We breed ours.’”
Beauty, savagery, and breeding are all part of this story of the brutal conflict in Sri Lanka in the 1980s, where people of so many groups fight for supremacy by exterminating each other. I can’t begin to understand all the politics, but I understand enough to know that your success depends on being born into the ‘right’ religious or ethnic or whatever group.
It is written in second person, which in this case, makes me feel as if I’m inside the story, which is a little unsettling, considering the company I’m keeping.
“ANSWERS
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.”
Maali Almeida wakes up, feeling weird and remembers the confusion he felt after an LSD trip. So he figures he must have had some of his friend Jaki’s ‘silly pills’ and is still coming down. He finds himself shouting at some woman in a white sari in a government office.
No, it’s not that. The people around him are peculiar, kind of fuzzy, funny colours, missing limbs, decidedly not normal.
“The woman opens a large register. She looks you up and down with neither interest nor scorn.
‘First must confirm details. Name?’
‘Malinda Albert Kabalana.’
‘One syllable, please.’
‘Maali.’
‘You know what a syllable is?’
‘Maal.’
‘Thank you. Religion?’
‘None.’
‘How silly. Cause of death?’
‘Don’t remember.’
‘Time since death?’
‘Don’t know.’”
Meanwhile, the people/creatures are swarming the counters with questions about their deaths.
“Lankans can’t queue. Unless you define a queue as an amorphous curve with multiple entry points.”
Maali is a photographer, especially of war zones and atrocities, collecting particular photos that he says will “bring down governments.” But they are in a box, under his bed, and while he can pass through walls, he can’t move his box, light as it is.
“The box is flimsy, made of paper that wants to be cardboard when it grows up. It houses five envelopes.”
So what now? It seems he is in a sort of holding pattern, bardo, limbo (underworld?), and he has seven moons, seven nights (not months) to try to contact Jaki (she of the ‘silly pills’) or his boyfriend, DD, to find the box and use the photos.
It also seems, that like everywhere else, there are tricks to learn, ways to manipulate circumstances – up to a point.
“You are getting the hang of riding winds, though you struggle to explain it to yourself. Like gravity is a bus that lets you hang on its footboards. Like holding your breath until your breath holds you. Like a magic carpet without the carpet bit. You float like a particle must do when it’s tipsy.
. . .
Sena’s garbage bag cape flutters behind him. He looks less like a superman and more like a broken umbrella.
. . .
‘Mara trees catch winds. Like radios catch frequencies. So do bo trees, banyan trees and probably any other big tree that blows wind.’
‘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.’
‘What are we doing here?’
‘If you quiet your mind, you may hear your name spoken. If you hear your name, you can go there. Do it while your corpse is fresh, so to speak. After ninety moons, no one will care about your Colombo 7 arse.’”
It’s a terrific ghost story, thriller, dark comedy, and political commentary that I was swept along with Maali. I certainly got lost in the politics, but for those who want a program, Maalli says he made a cheatsheet, a comprehensive list he put together for his friend Andy McGowan, from ‘Newsweek’, so that if readers wish to refer to it, they may. I am including it, because the summaries give such a good picture of what anyone in Sri Lanka was up against, day to day.
“ABBREVIATIONS
Dear Andy
To an outsider, the Sri Lankan tragedy will appear confusing and irreparable. It needn’t be either. Here are the main players.
LTTE – The Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam
* Want a separate Tamil state.
* Prepared to slaughter Tamil civilians and moderates to achieve this.
JVP – The Janatha Vimukthi Peramuna
* Want to overthrow the capitalist state.
* Are willing to murder the working class while they liberate them.
UNP – The United National Party
* Known as the Uncle Nephew Party.
* In power since the late ’70s and embroiled in the above two wars.
STF – The Special Task Force
* On behalf of the Govt, will abduct and torture anyone suspected of being or abetting the LTTE or the JVP.
The nation divides into races, the races divide into factions and the factions turn on each other. Whoever is in the opposition will preach multiculturalism and then enforce Sinhala Buddhist dominance in exchange for power.
You are not the only outsider here, Andy. There are many others as confused as you are.
IPKF – The Indian Peace Keeping Force
* Sent by our neighbour to preserve peace.
* Are willing to burn villages to fulfil their mission.
UN – United Nations
* Have offices in Colombo.
* Are arseholes to work with.
RAW – Research and Analysis Wing
* Indian secret service, here to broker dodgy deals.
* Are best avoided.
CIA – Central Intelligence Agency
* Sits on the shores of the Diego Garcia islands, holding very powerful binoculars.
* Is this true, Andy? Say it ain’t so.
It’s not that complicated, my friend. Don’t try and look for the good guys ’cause there ain’t none. Everyone is proud and greedy and no one can resolve things without money changing hands or fists being raised.
Things have escalated beyond what anyone imagined and they keep getting worse and worse. Stay safe, Andy. These wars aren’t worth dying over. None of them are.”
The author reworked his original Chats with the Dead (which is now listed as just another edition of this book) for a western audience. The result is this magnificent, grisly, dark, satirical, unforgettable story that still has a warm heart hidden inside. It certainly earned its 2022 Booker Prize.
P.S. I particularly enjoyed reading in The Guardian that he loved the Choose Your Own Adventure stories when he was a youngster, and as a teen, he was greatly moved by Tim O'Brien’s Vietnam stories in The Things They Carried, which is a favourite of mine. The book he rereads, and which inspired this, is the one I reread as well, David Eagleman's imaginative Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives, which he thinks should be compulsory reading in schools. (I agree.) So it’s no surprise that I connected so strongly with this one.
My review of Sum: Forty Tales from the Afterlives
My review of The Things They Carried
December 22, 2022
“The Afterlife is as confusing as the Before Death, the In Between is as arbitrary as the Down There.”
An entertaining and sometimes even hilarious novel, if it weren’t for the dramatic and gruesome nature of both the setting and certain scenes. Karunatilaka evokes the civil war in his country, Sri Lanka, in the 1980s, a civil war that lasted officially until 2009, but still flares up regularly, with massacres between Tamils and Sinhalese. His choice of a professional photographer, Maali Almeidi, as the main character conveniently puts us right in the middle of the violence. But even more convenient is the choice to stage Almeidi in a kind of limbo, 'the In-Between'; after all he turns out to be dead (murdered?) and has 7 days (actually moons) to reach The Light. The limbo is a surreal world in which waiting spirits wander, but also Helpers who have to put them on the right track, monsters and evil spirits of all kinds. The wandering spirits can still follow what happens in the real world, and to a limited extent they can also steer it a little. And – you guessed it – Karunatilaka uses all that to build up a successful arc of suspense.
Our unfortunate Almeidi insists on knowing how he died and why, and subsequently he wants to expose the cynical machinations of politicians, generals and other players in the civil war. He is certainly not a hero, because he sells his services to almost all parties and in between he is also a party animal, a drugs user, a gambler and an unfaithul (gay) friend. This allows Karunatilaka to play a whole series of registers, with a light moralistic undertone and occasionally some philosophizing about fate, karma, the sense/nonsense of revenge, and the role of evil in the world. Not that this novel is too heavy handed, on the contrary, the author generously sprinkles ironic references and (dark) humorous scenes. Actually, the reading is only somewhat hindered by the terrible tangle that is the Sri Lankan universe, although the author has also come up with a handy solution for that.
However, the aftertaste that remains, even after the more or less happy ending, is bitter. Because while you have been enjoying a hilarious comedy, an exotic detective, a moral and philosophical parable, it are mainly scenes of mutilated corpses and their related wandering ghosts (including a whole bunch of suicidals), and the cynicism of those in power, that leave a tragic impression. For once a justified Man/Booker. (3.5 stars)
An entertaining and sometimes even hilarious novel, if it weren’t for the dramatic and gruesome nature of both the setting and certain scenes. Karunatilaka evokes the civil war in his country, Sri Lanka, in the 1980s, a civil war that lasted officially until 2009, but still flares up regularly, with massacres between Tamils and Sinhalese. His choice of a professional photographer, Maali Almeidi, as the main character conveniently puts us right in the middle of the violence. But even more convenient is the choice to stage Almeidi in a kind of limbo, 'the In-Between'; after all he turns out to be dead (murdered?) and has 7 days (actually moons) to reach The Light. The limbo is a surreal world in which waiting spirits wander, but also Helpers who have to put them on the right track, monsters and evil spirits of all kinds. The wandering spirits can still follow what happens in the real world, and to a limited extent they can also steer it a little. And – you guessed it – Karunatilaka uses all that to build up a successful arc of suspense.
Our unfortunate Almeidi insists on knowing how he died and why, and subsequently he wants to expose the cynical machinations of politicians, generals and other players in the civil war. He is certainly not a hero, because he sells his services to almost all parties and in between he is also a party animal, a drugs user, a gambler and an unfaithul (gay) friend. This allows Karunatilaka to play a whole series of registers, with a light moralistic undertone and occasionally some philosophizing about fate, karma, the sense/nonsense of revenge, and the role of evil in the world. Not that this novel is too heavy handed, on the contrary, the author generously sprinkles ironic references and (dark) humorous scenes. Actually, the reading is only somewhat hindered by the terrible tangle that is the Sri Lankan universe, although the author has also come up with a handy solution for that.
However, the aftertaste that remains, even after the more or less happy ending, is bitter. Because while you have been enjoying a hilarious comedy, an exotic detective, a moral and philosophical parable, it are mainly scenes of mutilated corpses and their related wandering ghosts (including a whole bunch of suicidals), and the cynicism of those in power, that leave a tragic impression. For once a justified Man/Booker. (3.5 stars)
October 25, 2022
I'm obviously in the minority here but I didn't enjoy this book at all. It could've been at least 200 pages shorter. It was repetitive and dragged on for longer than necessary. It had an array of characters that in my opinion didn't advance the plot in any way and I just couldn't be bothered to remember. It just felt disjointed. The impression I got of Sri Lanka was entirely negative as well.
November 19, 2023
4,5*
Nenhum dos outros fotógrafos durou mais do que dois massacres. A maioria não tinha estômago para suportar tanto sangue e muitos eram avessos aos riscos que corriam quando comparados com o que ganhavam. Mas tu estavas viciado naquilo. (…) Talvez tu – jovem e esperto – pudesses conseguir a fotografia que faria os governantes virarem-se contra a guerra. Talvez conseguisses fazer pela guerra civil em Lanka o que a menina nua e coberta de napalm fez pelo Vietname.
As Sete Proezas de Shehan Karunatilaka
1-Com “As Sete Luas de Maali Almeida”, digníssimo vencedor do Booker Prize de 2022, Shehan construiu uma tragicomédia em torno da guerra civil que grassava no Sri Lanka nos anos 80 (e se estendeu até 2009), incindindo sobretudo no pogrom que visou a comunidade tâmil e que ficou conhecido como Black July. Confronta-nos com a catarse que encontrei em obras como “Atos Humanos” e “A Quinta Dimensão”, mas atenua-a com a sátira que visa os poderosos, os intolerantes, os corruptos, os facínoras.
Jonny fala para uma engenhoca semelhante a um tijolo que é supostamente a mais recente evolução do telefone, se bem que custe imaginar que alguém queira, de livre vontade, carregar calhaus emissores de radiação no bolso.
2-Para a compor recorreu a uma técnica que raramente funciona comigo, que é a utilização da segunda pessoa do singular. Ler mais de 400 páginas com o narrador a referir-se a si próprio como “tu” poderia ser cansativo e forçado, mas sendo do ponto de vista de um morto, Maali Almeida, fotógrafo de guerra, jogador inveterado e homossexual promíscuo não assumido, faz sentido e torna-se um verdadeiro tour de force.
Sempre acreditaste que a voz da tua cabeça pertencia a outra pessoa. E que te relatava a história da tua vida como se já tivesse acontecido. O narrador omnisciente que adicionava uma voz-off ao teu dia. O terapeuta que te dizia que parasses de te lamentar e fizesses aquilo para que tinha jeito. Que era ganhar ao blackjack, seduzir jovens camponeses e fotografar lugares assustadores.
3-Estando morto, conhecemos Maali no mundo do além, numa espécie de limbo, em que tem de cumprir uma certa burocracia e passar sete dias até se encaminhar para a luz. Ou não. É nesse período que tenta perceber se acabou morto por acidente, homicídio, suicídio, visto que de início o seu cadáver “foi desaparecido”. O sobrenatural testa a minha paciência, sobretudo se houver demónios, mas Shehan cria um universo de seres do outro mundo extremamente cativante, com passados pertinentes para o enredo.
O visionário cingalês Arthur C. Clarke dizia que atrás de cada pessoa viva há 30 fantasmas, a proporção de mortos para vivos. Olhas em redor e receias que o eminente pensador tenha feito uma estimativa bastante por baixo. Cada pessoa que vês tem um espírito agachado atrás dela. Algumas têm guardiões que pairam por cima delas e enxotam os espíritos malévolos, os pretas,os rahu e os demónios.
4-Apesar da quantidade de vilões, “As Sete Luas de Maali Almeida” põe-nos na presença de personagens muito complexas, cheias de defeitos e de moral duvidosa, tanto no mundo dos vivos como no universo dos mortos. E como são bastantes, a lista de dramatis personae no início do livro é uma ajuda inestimável.
5-Creio que Shehan Karunatilaka tinha noção de como este livro poderia alienar o mundo ocidental com factos históricos de um país que poucos fora dele conhecem, numa época em que muitos possíveis leitores ainda não tinham nascido ou seriam demasiado novos para a recordar, pelo que criou uma cábula com as siglas das “principais forças em ação”. Além desta ajuda que me foi preciosa para perceber a dinâmica da guerra civil, visto que sobre este tema só lera “O Fantasma de Anil” de Michael Ondaatje, esta obra recordou-me da passagem dos portugueses também pelo Ceilão na sua voragem colonialista, através de nomes que ainda hoje perduram, como Mendis, Fernando, o próprio Almeida, e até mesmo do lago Beira, destino final de muitos cadáveres.
Os portugueses assumiram a posição do missionário. Os holandeses tomaram-nos por trás. Quando os ingleses chegaram, já estávamos de joelhos, com as mãos atrás das costas e a boca aberta.
6-A escrita de Shehan é verdadeiramente ginasticada e isso nota-se sobretudo nos diálogos, que constituem grande parte desta história. Para quem como eu acha que os diálogos são o método escrita preferido dos preguiçosos, espantou-me ver-me enredada neles sem nunca me aborrecer.
7- Raramente encontro justificação para um livro com mais de 300 páginas, pelo que entrei com o cepticismo do costume nesta obra, mas com excepção de uma lua ou duas em que a trama esmorece um pouco, este autor cingalês consegue até a proeza de manter um ritmo quase constante, com vários momentos revoltantes e um particularmente comovente de misericórdia para com humanos e animais, e provar que este imenso fôlego na sua estreia merecia realmente um prémio sonante.
“As Sete Luas de Maali Almeida” é um livro original e muitíssimo bem-conseguido que me conquistou pelo seu tom hipercrítico e pela estrutura inteligente, mas que talvez só interesse a quem apreciar um bom desafio.
[Na ficha técnica diz-se que esta obra beneficiou da permanência da tradutora no Centro Europeus de Tradutores, e parece-me realmente ser esse o caso, pois o texto em português é fluído, com excelentes escolhas de calão, sem perder a qualidade de texto literário, tirando uma ou outra opção menos feliz, como “putinha” para “slut” (aplicado a Maali) e manter-se “fixer” no original quando há equivalente em português, mas a revisão não está ao mesmo nível. Não quis aprofundar mais, para não me estragar o prazer da leitura como já aconteceu com outros livros, mas logo nas primeiras páginas dei pela falta de uma frase inteira e onde, mais tarde, se lê “150 pessoas sem teto”, depois de um massacre histórico, deveria ler-se “150 mil pessoas sem teto”, ligeiramente diferente. Não mata mas mói e semeia a desconfiança.]
Nenhum dos outros fotógrafos durou mais do que dois massacres. A maioria não tinha estômago para suportar tanto sangue e muitos eram avessos aos riscos que corriam quando comparados com o que ganhavam. Mas tu estavas viciado naquilo. (…) Talvez tu – jovem e esperto – pudesses conseguir a fotografia que faria os governantes virarem-se contra a guerra. Talvez conseguisses fazer pela guerra civil em Lanka o que a menina nua e coberta de napalm fez pelo Vietname.
As Sete Proezas de Shehan Karunatilaka
1-Com “As Sete Luas de Maali Almeida”, digníssimo vencedor do Booker Prize de 2022, Shehan construiu uma tragicomédia em torno da guerra civil que grassava no Sri Lanka nos anos 80 (e se estendeu até 2009), incindindo sobretudo no pogrom que visou a comunidade tâmil e que ficou conhecido como Black July. Confronta-nos com a catarse que encontrei em obras como “Atos Humanos” e “A Quinta Dimensão”, mas atenua-a com a sátira que visa os poderosos, os intolerantes, os corruptos, os facínoras.
Jonny fala para uma engenhoca semelhante a um tijolo que é supostamente a mais recente evolução do telefone, se bem que custe imaginar que alguém queira, de livre vontade, carregar calhaus emissores de radiação no bolso.
2-Para a compor recorreu a uma técnica que raramente funciona comigo, que é a utilização da segunda pessoa do singular. Ler mais de 400 páginas com o narrador a referir-se a si próprio como “tu” poderia ser cansativo e forçado, mas sendo do ponto de vista de um morto, Maali Almeida, fotógrafo de guerra, jogador inveterado e homossexual promíscuo não assumido, faz sentido e torna-se um verdadeiro tour de force.
Sempre acreditaste que a voz da tua cabeça pertencia a outra pessoa. E que te relatava a história da tua vida como se já tivesse acontecido. O narrador omnisciente que adicionava uma voz-off ao teu dia. O terapeuta que te dizia que parasses de te lamentar e fizesses aquilo para que tinha jeito. Que era ganhar ao blackjack, seduzir jovens camponeses e fotografar lugares assustadores.
3-Estando morto, conhecemos Maali no mundo do além, numa espécie de limbo, em que tem de cumprir uma certa burocracia e passar sete dias até se encaminhar para a luz. Ou não. É nesse período que tenta perceber se acabou morto por acidente, homicídio, suicídio, visto que de início o seu cadáver “foi desaparecido”. O sobrenatural testa a minha paciência, sobretudo se houver demónios, mas Shehan cria um universo de seres do outro mundo extremamente cativante, com passados pertinentes para o enredo.
O visionário cingalês Arthur C. Clarke dizia que atrás de cada pessoa viva há 30 fantasmas, a proporção de mortos para vivos. Olhas em redor e receias que o eminente pensador tenha feito uma estimativa bastante por baixo. Cada pessoa que vês tem um espírito agachado atrás dela. Algumas têm guardiões que pairam por cima delas e enxotam os espíritos malévolos, os pretas,os rahu e os demónios.
4-Apesar da quantidade de vilões, “As Sete Luas de Maali Almeida” põe-nos na presença de personagens muito complexas, cheias de defeitos e de moral duvidosa, tanto no mundo dos vivos como no universo dos mortos. E como são bastantes, a lista de dramatis personae no início do livro é uma ajuda inestimável.
5-Creio que Shehan Karunatilaka tinha noção de como este livro poderia alienar o mundo ocidental com factos históricos de um país que poucos fora dele conhecem, numa época em que muitos possíveis leitores ainda não tinham nascido ou seriam demasiado novos para a recordar, pelo que criou uma cábula com as siglas das “principais forças em ação”. Além desta ajuda que me foi preciosa para perceber a dinâmica da guerra civil, visto que sobre este tema só lera “O Fantasma de Anil” de Michael Ondaatje, esta obra recordou-me da passagem dos portugueses também pelo Ceilão na sua voragem colonialista, através de nomes que ainda hoje perduram, como Mendis, Fernando, o próprio Almeida, e até mesmo do lago Beira, destino final de muitos cadáveres.
Os portugueses assumiram a posição do missionário. Os holandeses tomaram-nos por trás. Quando os ingleses chegaram, já estávamos de joelhos, com as mãos atrás das costas e a boca aberta.
6-A escrita de Shehan é verdadeiramente ginasticada e isso nota-se sobretudo nos diálogos, que constituem grande parte desta história. Para quem como eu acha que os diálogos são o método escrita preferido dos preguiçosos, espantou-me ver-me enredada neles sem nunca me aborrecer.
7- Raramente encontro justificação para um livro com mais de 300 páginas, pelo que entrei com o cepticismo do costume nesta obra, mas com excepção de uma lua ou duas em que a trama esmorece um pouco, este autor cingalês consegue até a proeza de manter um ritmo quase constante, com vários momentos revoltantes e um particularmente comovente de misericórdia para com humanos e animais, e provar que este imenso fôlego na sua estreia merecia realmente um prémio sonante.
“As Sete Luas de Maali Almeida” é um livro original e muitíssimo bem-conseguido que me conquistou pelo seu tom hipercrítico e pela estrutura inteligente, mas que talvez só interesse a quem apreciar um bom desafio.
[Na ficha técnica diz-se que esta obra beneficiou da permanência da tradutora no Centro Europeus de Tradutores, e parece-me realmente ser esse o caso, pois o texto em português é fluído, com excelentes escolhas de calão, sem perder a qualidade de texto literário, tirando uma ou outra opção menos feliz, como “putinha” para “slut” (aplicado a Maali) e manter-se “fixer” no original quando há equivalente em português, mas a revisão não está ao mesmo nível. Não quis aprofundar mais, para não me estragar o prazer da leitura como já aconteceu com outros livros, mas logo nas primeiras páginas dei pela falta de uma frase inteira e onde, mais tarde, se lê “150 pessoas sem teto”, depois de um massacre histórico, deveria ler-se “150 mil pessoas sem teto”, ligeiramente diferente. Não mata mas mói e semeia a desconfiança.]
October 29, 2022
4.5 Stars.
The novel opens with our protagonist, Maali Almeida, dead and already in the afterlife. An afterlife that seems very much like a hospital waiting room. Everybody is shouting at the same woman situated behind a fibreglass counter. Not much of an afterlife. The trouble is Maali, when questioned by the woman for details cannot remember when or how he died. In life Maali, was a war photographer, he still has his camera, cracked lens and all, with him.
The woman behind the counter yells to the queue,
“YOU ALL HAVE SEVEN MOONS”.
Seven moons before they can enter the light. He asks around, what is the light? The answer is elusive, nobody is certain, not even the woman behind the counter.
It is then that he realizes he recognizes the woman. She is/was a university lecturer killed by Tamil extremists. Her death was in all the papers in 1989. She tells him that he needs to have his ears checked before he can “enter the light”. “Ears checked”? This must be a dream.
Almeida is not the most likable of characters. He sleeps with just about anything that moves, he gambles away everything he earns, and ironically seeing as he wakes up in the afterlife, he is an atheist. But we never truly find out if there is a god or not. It is all about entering the light before your seven moons are up.
Almeida has been covering the interminable civil war that has raged through Sri Lanka during the eighties. He is freelance and works for all sides in the conflagration. He has taken shots that if exposed will have him “disappeared” like so many others. Perhaps why he is in the afterlife waiting room?
Underneath his bed he has a stash of photos that will bring down a major player in the war. It is these photos that he wants to expose to the public. So, he must figure out a way to do that before his seven moons are up. There are ways to do it. There are ways to “whisper” to the living, and ways to manipulate physical objects.
Karunatilaka seems to have covered his bases with religion, with elements of Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism. Every soul is at liberty to fly around, ghosts travel by catching the wind, putting their affairs in order, before they must enter the light or stay trapped, marooned forever in this world. Some choose to stay becoming ghosts or ghouls. Unhappy souls choose to remain and whisper evil thoughts into people’s heads, the cause for much of our misery.
It is a wonderful world that Karunatilika has created. Evil, sin, even sickness, caused by disillusioned, vengeful ghosts. Souls that do not want to move on but stay and cause as much pain and sickness to the living as they can.
One thing I was deliriously happy to find out is that in this novel, animals have souls as well. And there is a hilarious passage where Almeida puts his foot in his mouth not realizing that two ghost dogs can talk. He is surprised when the female dog asks him for directions. When he tells them he didn’t realize that dogs could talk, she replies,
“We didn’t know apes could hear. So condescending. If I am ever reborn human, I will swallow my umbilical”.
In a book with such a dark, melancholic backdrop, this humour saturates the pages.
Told in the second person each chapter is a moon, and the novel moves at a frantic pace, with each new moon bringing Maali closer to being trapped, forced to remain in this liminal world.
The novel also brings to light the horrible acts of violence and genocide that took place during the civil war. The staggering number of innocents who lost their lives simply because of being on the wrong side that currently had the upper hand. It staggers the mind how cruel, how violent we can be to ourselves.
If I am ever reborn human, I will swallow my umbilical as well.
The novel opens with our protagonist, Maali Almeida, dead and already in the afterlife. An afterlife that seems very much like a hospital waiting room. Everybody is shouting at the same woman situated behind a fibreglass counter. Not much of an afterlife. The trouble is Maali, when questioned by the woman for details cannot remember when or how he died. In life Maali, was a war photographer, he still has his camera, cracked lens and all, with him.
The woman behind the counter yells to the queue,
“YOU ALL HAVE SEVEN MOONS”.
Seven moons before they can enter the light. He asks around, what is the light? The answer is elusive, nobody is certain, not even the woman behind the counter.
It is then that he realizes he recognizes the woman. She is/was a university lecturer killed by Tamil extremists. Her death was in all the papers in 1989. She tells him that he needs to have his ears checked before he can “enter the light”. “Ears checked”? This must be a dream.
Almeida is not the most likable of characters. He sleeps with just about anything that moves, he gambles away everything he earns, and ironically seeing as he wakes up in the afterlife, he is an atheist. But we never truly find out if there is a god or not. It is all about entering the light before your seven moons are up.
Almeida has been covering the interminable civil war that has raged through Sri Lanka during the eighties. He is freelance and works for all sides in the conflagration. He has taken shots that if exposed will have him “disappeared” like so many others. Perhaps why he is in the afterlife waiting room?
Underneath his bed he has a stash of photos that will bring down a major player in the war. It is these photos that he wants to expose to the public. So, he must figure out a way to do that before his seven moons are up. There are ways to do it. There are ways to “whisper” to the living, and ways to manipulate physical objects.
Karunatilaka seems to have covered his bases with religion, with elements of Hinduism, Buddhism, Catholicism. Every soul is at liberty to fly around, ghosts travel by catching the wind, putting their affairs in order, before they must enter the light or stay trapped, marooned forever in this world. Some choose to stay becoming ghosts or ghouls. Unhappy souls choose to remain and whisper evil thoughts into people’s heads, the cause for much of our misery.
It is a wonderful world that Karunatilika has created. Evil, sin, even sickness, caused by disillusioned, vengeful ghosts. Souls that do not want to move on but stay and cause as much pain and sickness to the living as they can.
One thing I was deliriously happy to find out is that in this novel, animals have souls as well. And there is a hilarious passage where Almeida puts his foot in his mouth not realizing that two ghost dogs can talk. He is surprised when the female dog asks him for directions. When he tells them he didn’t realize that dogs could talk, she replies,
“We didn’t know apes could hear. So condescending. If I am ever reborn human, I will swallow my umbilical”.
In a book with such a dark, melancholic backdrop, this humour saturates the pages.
Told in the second person each chapter is a moon, and the novel moves at a frantic pace, with each new moon bringing Maali closer to being trapped, forced to remain in this liminal world.
The novel also brings to light the horrible acts of violence and genocide that took place during the civil war. The staggering number of innocents who lost their lives simply because of being on the wrong side that currently had the upper hand. It staggers the mind how cruel, how violent we can be to ourselves.
If I am ever reborn human, I will swallow my umbilical as well.
October 17, 2022
Winner of the Booker Prize 2022
It is almost two weeks since I finished reading this - I have been struggling to find time to write reviews, so I will keep this short.
This was a curate's egg for me - there were parts I liked a lot and others I really didn't get on with, and one of those is fairly central to the whole plot - the main protagonist is dead but in a form of administrative limbo that enables him to visit the places he knew when alive. The death occurred in 1990, and the eponymous protagonist was a gay photographer who left a collection of pictures that could potentially be devastating in the wrong hands.
There is some incisive stuff about life in Sri Lanka during this period (the early stages of the lengthy civil war) and the nature of the war and the regime, but for me the ghost story elements intervened too often to make this a rewarding reading experience.
It is almost two weeks since I finished reading this - I have been struggling to find time to write reviews, so I will keep this short.
This was a curate's egg for me - there were parts I liked a lot and others I really didn't get on with, and one of those is fairly central to the whole plot - the main protagonist is dead but in a form of administrative limbo that enables him to visit the places he knew when alive. The death occurred in 1990, and the eponymous protagonist was a gay photographer who left a collection of pictures that could potentially be devastating in the wrong hands.
There is some incisive stuff about life in Sri Lanka during this period (the early stages of the lengthy civil war) and the nature of the war and the regime, but for me the ghost story elements intervened too often to make this a rewarding reading experience.
October 17, 2022
New update: Booker Prize 2022 winner! Congratulations Shehan Karunatilaka!
Review written prior to winner announcement:
This is a brilliant story! I throughly enjoyed this book, and therefore my favourite so far of the Booker Shortlist (I still have yet to read Glory, which seems to be many people’s favourite for the prize).
Prize winner or not, this is a great book. The story magically mixes beauty and myth with the brutal and horrific atrocities of civil war and corrupt governments.
It could be tricky to keep up with at certain points, and was a surprisingly demanding read. But it is absolutely worth sticking with and persevering.
I will certainly be adding ‘Chinaman’ to my TBR list now.
Review written prior to winner announcement:
This is a brilliant story! I throughly enjoyed this book, and therefore my favourite so far of the Booker Shortlist (I still have yet to read Glory, which seems to be many people’s favourite for the prize).
Prize winner or not, this is a great book. The story magically mixes beauty and myth with the brutal and horrific atrocities of civil war and corrupt governments.
It could be tricky to keep up with at certain points, and was a surprisingly demanding read. But it is absolutely worth sticking with and persevering.
I will certainly be adding ‘Chinaman’ to my TBR list now.
April 13, 2024
”I was a pro. My life was a con.”
Част от проблемите на Малинда Алмейда Кабалана през 1990 г. започват веднага след смъртта му.
Сами по себе си, нито смъртта, нито проблемите (от всевъзможен характер) са нещо чуждо на Маали. Той е военен фоторепортер, който с рядка безпристрастност и самоотверженост снима трупове от всякаква етническа принадлежност из родната си Шри Ланка. Шриланкийците, както се оказва, не са спирали да се избиват от деколонизацията си през 1948 г. насам. Синхалското правителство, на хартия борещо тероризма (?) на тамилските тигри, също е много сръчно в “изчезването” на неудобни любители на истината, активисти по човешките права или просто спретва постановки с известен брой мъртъвци. Изобщо създаването на единна нация от воюващи един с друг етноси, военни с любов към властта и политици с още по-голяма любов към корупцията на един мъничък остров, прочут с чая и прекрасната си природа, е доста кървав процес.
Но освен, че снима не където, не когато и не когото трябва, Маали изпитва непреодолима привързаност към:
a/ хазарта (винаги губи) и
б/ красивите момчета (не стига, че може да си докара 10 години затвор с това, че е гей, но на всичкото отгоре не може да бъде верен само на един любим човек, даже когато най-сетне го е срещнал).
За съжаление, светът след смъртта му се оказва точно толкова сложен и заплетен като собствения му личен живот и вътрешното положение в Шри Ланка. Маали разполага със седем луни да открие кой го е убил (опциите са доста), да разгласи някои истини, да си отговори на всички житейски въпроси, мъчили човечеството още от появата на първата искрица съзнание, и да реши дали все пак да потегли към Светлината и към евентуално ново прераждане. Или пък да се включи в онези фракции на различните призрачни създания, които по най-разнообразни причини се мотаят из царството на смъртните и творят допълнителни проблеми в него.
Самият Маали е неустоима смесица от идеализъм, цинизъм, протест и хедонизъм, която го сближава с всички и с никого. Самият писател пък е неустоима смесица от разнообразни философски въпроси, иронична насмешка, мъничко (всъщност много!) тъга и изненадващи сюжетни хватки, надсмиващи се над стандартни жанрови рамки. Стоях на нокти до последната луна, където сюжетно нещата можеха да се оплескат поради задълбаване в някое религиозно или политкоректно клише, но за моя радост те в по-голямата си част са избегнати. Не че липсват съвсем, но пируетите се оказаха достатъчно и занимателни.
Над тази книга човек може да се понатъжи, поядоса и направо повбеси, да се позамисли, да се трогне и да се посмее. Но едва ли може да остане безразличен. А безразличието, между другото, е една от многото теми в сюжета.
4,5⭐️
П.П. Маали има силна духовна връзка със Сирил от ”Невидимите фурии на сърцето”. Но въпреки фантастичния елемент и игрите на абсурда, Маали ми беше много по-близък до сърцето. Стилът на Бойн далеч не ме докосна така, както този на Карунатилака.
****
▶️ Цитати:
☸️ “For atheists there are only moral choices. “
☸️ “Even the afterlife is designed to keep the masses stupid,”
🇱🇰 “To an outsider, the Sri Lankan tragedy will appear confusing and irreparable. It needn’t be either. Here are the main players.
[…]
The nation divides into races, the races divide into factions and the factions turn on each other. Whoever is in the opposition will preach multiculturalism and then enforce Sinhala Buddhist dominance in exchange for power.
You are not the only outsider here, Andy. There are many others as confused as you are.
[…]
It’s not that complicated, my friend. Don’t try and look for the good guys ’cause there ain’t none. Everyone is proud and greedy and no one can resolve things without money changing hands or fists being raised.”
📸 “I need the world to see what I saw.’
‘That is ego. That is all illusion.”
🇱🇰 “Does every Minister have a demon?’
‘Only the very best.”
🇱🇰 “Do not listen to Bad Samaritans. Demand your justice. ”
☸️ “History is people with ships and weapons wiping out those who forgot to invent them”
📸 “All stories are recycled and all stories are unfair.”
“So we make up stories because we’re afraid of the dark.”
☸️ “Maybe not believing in gods gives you permission to become a demon.’
‘As if believing in God or karma keeps you kind.”
☸️ “The order is made to appear natural.”
☸️ “Organised collectives of evil doers who think they are performing the work of the righteous. That is what should make us shudder.”
🐆 “Everybody is just trying not to get eaten. I need a break from the food chain.”
December 20, 2023
Amendment to any recommendation of this book is that you are going to have to engage with Sri Lankan politics and history to get the most out of this book. I'm more convinced than ever that this book isn't for everyone, but it's for me 1000%. If I were to dream up my ideal book, it would probably be a magical realist satire of political corruption starring a morally grey queer character contemplating the meaning of life. That's what this is! Hope this helps.
Absolutely shocked by how well a booker prize winner worked for me, almost makes up for me reading Bewilderment by Richard Powers two years ago
I have been burned by the Booker prize, so imagine my surprise to have had such a good time with this book. I did try and summarize it for my sister last night and failed epically, so I apologize in advance for this scattered review.
This isn’t a blanket recommendation of this book — if you aren’t interested in engaging with Sri Lankan history, this book won’t be for you. I was moving between the book and several google searches about Sri Lankan politics, the Tamils, and the civil war. But I was so engaged with it.
Separate from the political and social references, I found this book very funny. Maali Almeida is an at-times hilarious narrator. I also found his character as half Tamil, half Sinhalese, working as a photographer without political affiliation, leant a really fascinating point of view on the violence in the country.
It’s satire and magical realism, and the storytelling structure of this is hard to describe and hard to follow at times. (The book counts down Maali’s week as a ghost, or his seven moons, but you also jump between memories of his experiences when he was alive, his friends and family’s reactions to his death, and him navigating the ghost world of Colombo.)
Anyway, a rare award winner I feel was worthy of the award.
A few comps: the character study and structure of The Death Of Vivek Oji, with the reflections on Sri Lankan history of A Passage North, with the satirical narrator of Black Buck? Maybe, even that might reduce it too much.
The audiobook was also great, but I appreciated reading and listening to this one together.
Absolutely shocked by how well a booker prize winner worked for me, almost makes up for me reading Bewilderment by Richard Powers two years ago
I have been burned by the Booker prize, so imagine my surprise to have had such a good time with this book. I did try and summarize it for my sister last night and failed epically, so I apologize in advance for this scattered review.
This isn’t a blanket recommendation of this book — if you aren’t interested in engaging with Sri Lankan history, this book won’t be for you. I was moving between the book and several google searches about Sri Lankan politics, the Tamils, and the civil war. But I was so engaged with it.
Separate from the political and social references, I found this book very funny. Maali Almeida is an at-times hilarious narrator. I also found his character as half Tamil, half Sinhalese, working as a photographer without political affiliation, leant a really fascinating point of view on the violence in the country.
It’s satire and magical realism, and the storytelling structure of this is hard to describe and hard to follow at times. (The book counts down Maali’s week as a ghost, or his seven moons, but you also jump between memories of his experiences when he was alive, his friends and family’s reactions to his death, and him navigating the ghost world of Colombo.)
Anyway, a rare award winner I feel was worthy of the award.
A few comps: the character study and structure of The Death Of Vivek Oji, with the reflections on Sri Lankan history of A Passage North, with the satirical narrator of Black Buck? Maybe, even that might reduce it too much.
The audiobook was also great, but I appreciated reading and listening to this one together.
January 7, 2024
Vay canına, ne kitap, ne kitap!
Livera Yayınları, Sri Lankalı yazar Shehan Karunatilaka'nın, kendisine 2022'de Uluslararası Booker Ödülü'nü getiren kitabı "Maali Almeida'nın Yedi Ay Dönümü"nü yayınlayacağını duyurduğundan beri bekliyordum, nihayet kavuştuk. İlk 50 sayfada biraz kafanız karışabilir ve olanı biteni anlamakta güçlük çekebilirsiniz, yılmayın. Sonrası soluksuz bir yolculuk.
90lı yılların Sri Lanka'sındayız. Anlatıcımız, fotoğrafçı Maali Almeida ölüp kendini öte dünyada buluyor. Araftan bir sonraki aşamaya geçene dek yedi günü var ve bu süre içinde hatırlamadığı katilini ve ölüm sebebini bulmak için hayaleti yer yüzünde, rüzgarların peşi sıra salınıyor, biz de onun ardından gidiyoruz.
Gittiğimiz yerler korkunç. Sri Lanka'nın kanlı iç savaşının içinde sürükleniyoruz. Özellikle 1983'te resmi rakamlara göre 5 günde 6000'e yakın insanın hayatını kaybettiği Kara Temmuz olaylarından başlayarak, devletin, polisin, ordunun kontrgerillanın ve çetelerin 100.000'e yakın insanı öldürmesiyle ancak 2009'da sona erecek olan o büyük kıyımın en kanlı yıllarında Maali Almeida'nın bir muhalif ve eşcinsel olarak yaptığı tanıklığa tanıklık ediyoruz.
Almeida müthiş çizilmiş bir karakter. Kendisini sevmek de, sevmemek de çok zor. Bu kitapta ölüsünü dinliyoruz ama bir karakter ancak bu kadar kanlı canlı olabilir; tüm zaafları, zayıflıkları, tasası, hırsı ve derdiyle beraber, yer yer bir anti-kahraman, yer yer gerçek bir kahraman. Karunatilaka'nın dili çok lezzetli, kitabın kurgusu muazzam, yarattığı dünya müthiş, karanlığı çok cezbedici - içine girince çıkmak imkansız. Modern zamanların Usta ile Margarita'sı gibi bir metin bu. Bayıldım.
Şöyle bitsin: "Tüm hikâyeler tekrar tekrar anlatılır ve hepsi de adaletsizdir. Çoğu insanın şansı yaver gider, çoğu acı çeker. Çoğu insan kitaplarla dolu evlerde doğar, çoğu savaş bataklığında büyür. Sonunda hepsi toza dönüşür. Tüm hikâyelerin sonunda görüntü kararır."
Önemli not: çeviride ciddi sıkıntılar var. Özellikle sonlara doğru neredeyse her sayfada yazım hataları ve düşük cümlelerle karşılaşıyor insan, okuma ritmini bozacak ölçüde sık. İkinci baskıda muhakkak gözden geçirilmesi şart, beni epeyce yordu maalesef.
Livera Yayınları, Sri Lankalı yazar Shehan Karunatilaka'nın, kendisine 2022'de Uluslararası Booker Ödülü'nü getiren kitabı "Maali Almeida'nın Yedi Ay Dönümü"nü yayınlayacağını duyurduğundan beri bekliyordum, nihayet kavuştuk. İlk 50 sayfada biraz kafanız karışabilir ve olanı biteni anlamakta güçlük çekebilirsiniz, yılmayın. Sonrası soluksuz bir yolculuk.
90lı yılların Sri Lanka'sındayız. Anlatıcımız, fotoğrafçı Maali Almeida ölüp kendini öte dünyada buluyor. Araftan bir sonraki aşamaya geçene dek yedi günü var ve bu süre içinde hatırlamadığı katilini ve ölüm sebebini bulmak için hayaleti yer yüzünde, rüzgarların peşi sıra salınıyor, biz de onun ardından gidiyoruz.
Gittiğimiz yerler korkunç. Sri Lanka'nın kanlı iç savaşının içinde sürükleniyoruz. Özellikle 1983'te resmi rakamlara göre 5 günde 6000'e yakın insanın hayatını kaybettiği Kara Temmuz olaylarından başlayarak, devletin, polisin, ordunun kontrgerillanın ve çetelerin 100.000'e yakın insanı öldürmesiyle ancak 2009'da sona erecek olan o büyük kıyımın en kanlı yıllarında Maali Almeida'nın bir muhalif ve eşcinsel olarak yaptığı tanıklığa tanıklık ediyoruz.
Almeida müthiş çizilmiş bir karakter. Kendisini sevmek de, sevmemek de çok zor. Bu kitapta ölüsünü dinliyoruz ama bir karakter ancak bu kadar kanlı canlı olabilir; tüm zaafları, zayıflıkları, tasası, hırsı ve derdiyle beraber, yer yer bir anti-kahraman, yer yer gerçek bir kahraman. Karunatilaka'nın dili çok lezzetli, kitabın kurgusu muazzam, yarattığı dünya müthiş, karanlığı çok cezbedici - içine girince çıkmak imkansız. Modern zamanların Usta ile Margarita'sı gibi bir metin bu. Bayıldım.
Şöyle bitsin: "Tüm hikâyeler tekrar tekrar anlatılır ve hepsi de adaletsizdir. Çoğu insanın şansı yaver gider, çoğu acı çeker. Çoğu insan kitaplarla dolu evlerde doğar, çoğu savaş bataklığında büyür. Sonunda hepsi toza dönüşür. Tüm hikâyelerin sonunda görüntü kararır."
Önemli not: çeviride ciddi sıkıntılar var. Özellikle sonlara doğru neredeyse her sayfada yazım hataları ve düşük cümlelerle karşılaşıyor insan, okuma ritmini bozacak ölçüde sık. İkinci baskıda muhakkak gözden geçirilmesi şart, beni epeyce yordu maalesef.
January 23, 2023
Audiobook….read by Shivantha Wijesinha
……14 hours and 17 minutes
Winner of the Booker Prize …..
I should’ve known…..
…..when I kept putting this audiobook down …..only to TRY AGAIN….
…..at least three times…..only to go in….
and out….
in….
and out….
of giving a rats ass about the story…..(I’m willing to take the blame > it’s me > not the book)…..
but while looking for the BOOKER PRICE NUGGETS to grab me tightly ….. I never got deeply emotionally connected.
I heard the words…..which seemed much too long…
Descriptions were grotesque…..(I know > that was the point)….but I didn’t enjoy it.
‘nough said…..
……14 hours and 17 minutes
Winner of the Booker Prize …..
I should’ve known…..
…..when I kept putting this audiobook down …..only to TRY AGAIN….
…..at least three times…..only to go in….
and out….
in….
and out….
of giving a rats ass about the story…..(I’m willing to take the blame > it’s me > not the book)…..
but while looking for the BOOKER PRICE NUGGETS to grab me tightly ….. I never got deeply emotionally connected.
I heard the words…..which seemed much too long…
Descriptions were grotesque…..(I know > that was the point)….but I didn’t enjoy it.
‘nough said…..
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