{"id":79934,"date":"2022-10-18T00:54:48","date_gmt":"2022-10-18T04:54:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=79934"},"modified":"2022-10-18T14:58:08","modified_gmt":"2022-10-18T18:58:08","slug":"shehan-karunatilakas-booker-prize-winner-the-seven-moons-of-maali-almeida-is-narrated-by-a-dead-man-only-the-dead-could-offer-plausible-explanations-of-the-sri","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/?p=79934","title":{"rendered":"Shehan Karunatilaka\u2019s Booker Prize Winner \u201cThe Seven Moons of Maali Almeida\u201d is narrated by a dead man: \u2018Only the dead could offer plausible explanations of the Sri Lankan tragedy, as the living clearly did not have a clue\u2019 \u2026 Shehan Karunatilaka"},"content":{"rendered":"


\nBy’
\nJustine Jordan<\/strong><\/p>\n

The remarkable thing about this violence-soaked novel narrated by a dead man is how full of life it is. Shehan Karunatilaka\u2019s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida comes a decade after his rollicking debut Chinaman, which combined the love of cricket with the horror of Sri Lanka\u2019s civil war. Set at the tail end of the 80s, his second novel again plumbs national violence and atrocity, teasing out its roots in colonial history. It\u2019s also an offbeat love story, both romantic and platonic, and a whodunnit written in the urgent, intimate second person.<\/p>\n

As the novel opens, Maali Almeida, a charming, dilettantish photographer with a weakness for gambling and beautiful boys, wakes up dead. He finds himself in an afterlife that\u2019s just as threatening and confusing as the living world, a busy and chaotic realm drawing on Sri Lankan myth and folklore as well as Dante\u2019s Inferno.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Death energises the laid-back Maali: his quest over the course of one week or \u201cseven moons\u201d is to find out how he died by haunting those on Earth, but also to guide his boyfriend and best friend Jaki to the photographs he\u2019s surreptitiously taken while working as a fixer for various factions \u2013 images revealing the true horror of atrocities committed and the level of foreign and government involvement. He\u2019d hoped \u2013 \u201csilly old you\u201d \u2013 that his pictures could \u201cdo for Lanka\u2019s civil war what naked napalm girl did for Vietnam\u201d.
\nKarunatilaka wrote his national catastrophe as a ghost story, he has said, because \u201cit seemed that only the dead could offer plausible explanations of the Sri Lankan tragedy, as the living clearly did not have a clue\u201d. <\/p>\n

This tone of exasperated absurdism, reminiscent of Joseph Heller\u2019s Catch-22, reigns throughout, especially in the \u201ccheatsheet\u201d Maali puts together for a foreign journalist: there are the Tamil Tigers, ready to slaughter Tamil civilians to achieve a separate state; Marxist revolutionaries who murder the working class; the government, abducting and torturing citizens; Indian peacekeepers \u201cwilling to burn villages to fulfil their mission\u201d. \u201cDon\u2019t try and look for the good guys \u2019cause there ain\u2019t none.\u201d<\/p>\n

As with Heller, there\u2019s a tremendous comic energy to Karunatilaka\u2019s bitter satire, and an effortless vigour to his characterisation, the riotous cast encompassing demons, ghouls, torturers, politicians and lovers. <\/p>\n

But though Maali is hard-bitten, he\u2019s never cynical, especially as his new perspective on earthly events reveals his real priorities; you could even say death is the making of him. This is a novel that combines cosmic vision with down-to-earth humour and hard-won heart.<\/p>\n

Courtesy:The Guardian<\/em><\/p>\n

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By’ Justine Jordan The remarkable thing about this violence-soaked novel narrated by a dead man is how full of life it is. Shehan Karunatilaka\u2019s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida comes a decade after his rollicking debut Chinaman, which combined the love of cricket with the horror of Sri Lanka\u2019s civil war. Set at the …<\/p>\n

Continue reading ‘Shehan Karunatilaka\u2019s Booker Prize Winner \u201cThe Seven Moons of Maali Almeida\u201d is narrated by a dead man: \u2018Only the dead could offer plausible explanations of the Sri Lankan tragedy, as the living clearly did not have a clue\u2019 \u2026 Shehan Karunatilaka’ »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[12],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79934"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=79934"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79934\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":79935,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/79934\/revisions\/79935"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=79934"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=79934"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dbsjeyaraj.com\/dbsj\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=79934"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}