Shehan KarunatilakaRezensionen

This book is both captivating and deeply disturbing. At the same time it is both violent and witty. Sri Lankan author Shenan Karunatilaka paints a vivid portrait of a civil war-torn Sri Lanka where government death squads are murdering people and dumping their bodies in the lake of the capitol city.

The story revolves around Maali Almeida a war photographer that has documented some of the most brutal scenes in recent Sri Lankan history. The story begins with Maali Almeida dead and given seven moons before he needs to choose to move towards the Light. During these seven days, Maali tries to help his friends to find his negatives of unpublished photos that will reveal the brutality and the government officials that are responsible. While doing so, he encounters a world filled with the ghosts of people who had been tortured and murdered.

94000

Reason read: Booker TBR takedown
This is a 2022 novel by Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka (Sri Lanken/British). This book won the Booker in 2022. I listened to the audio through Hoopla Digital and it was excellently narrated. The description of the book is "searing satire set amid the mayhem of Sri Lankan civil war. The story is told by dead Maali Almeida, a photographer who sets out to solve the mystery of his own death and is given one week ("seven moons") during which he can travel between the afterlife and the real world. The death of Maali is gradually reviewed over the seven days and I thought this was an interesting way to learn about the civil war in Sri Lankan though it is not the only thing that is revealed. A good portion of this story looks at life of a gay man in a country that does not condone homosexuality.

I think the book did deserve to win a prize. It is an imaginative and well developed plot line. I don't generally like books with so much sexual content but this also is well done.

Because this story takes place in the afterlife, there is a great deal of what I suppose can be called magical realism or fantasy.½

Maali Almeida is a photojournalist, a gambler, and a closeted gay man in 1980s Sri Lanka. The novel begins with his death and his arrival in a state in-between life and the afterlife that is essentially a bureaucratic office space (shades of Beetlejuice). Maali has seven moons (on week) to settle his affairs on Earth before moving on to a stage of forgetting. As a war photojournalist he's taken photos documenting the atrocities of the Sri Lankan Civil War that he desperately wants released to the public so that it might end the violence.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a grim and darkly comic novel that satirizes Sri Lankan politics. It also relates the life of it's protagonist in flashback, curiously written in second person so that the reader identifies with Maali. Not knowing anything about the Sri Lankan Civil is definitely a challenge for me reading this book, although learning new things is one of the purposes of reading. It's also a strange and complicated story, but it does make for an interesting story of a specific place and time, with some magical realism for added measure.½

An unusual and interesting novel, full of exuberance, that sent me off on many tangential research dives, as I’m prone to do. I thought I knew a fair little bit about Sri Lanka but had never heard of the JVP communist insurgency in the late 1980s, so I was mistaken! I’d have liked it even more if it didn’t violate its own central titular rule - that a spirit has seven moons (days) to enter the light. Instead it went like:

Moon 1: You have seven days, Maali!
Moon 3: in this moon we encounter the alarming phrase “for the next few days” and it seems the passage of time in this moon has to be around a week or so actually
Moon 5: You only have two more days, Maali!

Eh, what’s going on here. Internal consistency may not be the novel’s strong suit, which is too bad as I’m pretty fond of internal consistency in a novel, but it does have much else going for it.

This was a worthy winner of the Booker which I really enjoyed. It starts with the narrator dead and in the endless admin of the afterlife, wanting to figure out what happened to him and how to communicate with the living. Gradually we get the tale of what happened to him, along with a hefty dose of Sri Lankan history and magic realism and ghosts. There is a lot going on but its really vivid and entertaining to read.

Incredibly creative depiction of the afterlife and filled with Sri Lankan mythology and history. My favorite kind of book, that delves deep into human nature and teaches.

One for cricket lovers. A couple of retired old cricket fans dedicate their time to researching the career of a mysterious genius Sri Lankan bowler for a film and a book with the intention of doing justice to his largely ignored record. A mixture of real and ficticious cricketers and test matches and an incidental telling of a family tale of love through the ages. The author demonstrates his sharp sense of humour, his penchant for the surreal and his power of description which were to be all on display in his later Booker winning novel.

I struggled through half of this book before giving up based on boredom.

I must slightly caveat this 5* - if you're interested in cricket, the subcontinent (especially Sri Lanka) and have a tolerance for fictional unreliable memoirs, then you may love this book. If you are deficient in any of these criteria, this may not be the book for you.

However- for those still with me - I think this is a wonderful book. All about unfulfilled ambition, and legacy. And the beauty of sport. The beauty and the glory and the capriciousness and the tragedy - in short, the romance. All set against the backdrop of the history of Sri Lanka, with its civil war and corruption and bigotry, and punctuated by cricket matches. It is sad and sweet, and suffused with the wisdom and acceptance of old age (impressively, this despite being the first novel by Karunatilaka).

The book is named for the stock delivery bowled by an unorthodox left-arm spinner - the main delivery bowled by the main character. The plot follows a dissolute sports writer W.G. (Wije) Karunasena and cricket fan trying to find out what happened to Mathews, the greatest bowler Wije had ever seen.

Is Mathews fictional or real? It is difficult to know what's real and made up - certainly I recognised many of the cricketing stories. Having done a little bit of research I would say the vast majority is fiction, but Karunatilaka has done a great job of weaving the two together. This greatly enhances the "unreliable narrator" aspect of the book - if you don't know what bits have been borrowed from the real world, it's impossible to know which bits are supposed to be made-up in the suspended-disbelief fictional world.

In my googling, though, I found a couple of faked up websites about Pradeed Mathews - versions of cricinfo.com and crikipedia (with a strategic '1' in place of an 'i') - clearly created as supporting material for the book (one of these pages is featured in the book, but I only reached that after I found the page myself). So you have a fictional book that uses stories from the real world, with fictional bits leaking back out into the real world - it's kinda fascinating (and I'm certainly not saying it's unique, but it was very pleasing and effective to stumble across these fictional spillages).

http://pradeepmathew.com/
http://cric1nfo.com/player/srilanka/achive/1992/june/
http://crickiped1a.com/record/engine/asia/srilanka/player/pradeep_1992/

Minor faults: it is somewhat romaticising of alcoholism (this is well reversed by the end, but may be jarring during the reading). And I found it a bit tricky to keep track of all the side characters. This is partly due to unfamiliar Sri Lankan names, but also because of the discursive nature of the narrative. I don't think these hamper the book particularly.

I didn't think this was a bad book, but I thought it had too much going on. It was simultaneously a look at the political situation in Sri Lanka during the Civil War, a look at what it means to be a gay man faced with homophobia, the AIDS epidemic in the 1980s, the interrelations between people, and the intersection of religion and what that could mean for us if there is an afterlife. It was a lot to digest, and I think the book tried to do too much to any of it well. It's a worthwhile read that left me wanting to do research into Sri Lankan history, but it could have been better.½

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.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is nothing more than a pretentious deluge of mental diarrhea.½

I think this novel is what's known as a "tour de force", i.e., "an impressive performance that has been accomplished with great skill." The author blends the fantasies and wild imaginings of the afterlife with the brutally realistic descriptions of the violence and corruption of Sri Lanka in the 1980's. The contrast is powerful and really draws the reader in, particularly after maybe the first 60-80 pages. That's the thing. You (reverting to the second person voice, a la Maali) have to stick with it because it is not easy to get into. But I am glad I did. Despite all the horror, and the conclusion that " (t)here is no animal more savage than a human", the novel's resolution is somewhat hopeful. It may not be for everybody, but I admired "Seven Moons" and fully understand the accolades it has received.

This is a five-star effort. Bursting with confident energy and creativity, the author tells of the troubles of the late 1980s Sri Lanka through the medium (?) of the ghost of a journalist.
The book makes clear that none of the protagonists in the struggle were free from blame for attrocities, but that the State was the clear instigator of vast excesses against citizens.
One of the worst extra-judicial killings mentioned in the book was that of journalist and activist, Richard de Zoysa in early 1990. By chance I had interactions in the Philippines with his junior associate/cadet journalist who had fled the country in the days after the killing. The shock and stress and fear in that young man has stayed with me ever since as a beacon of the wrongs of the government of the day. One hopes that this book will contribute to the conversation that needs to take place in Sri Lanka.

I think this might be a five star on a re-read, but there's so much going on that I'm not sure I followed every string. I love the premise, a man wakes up to find himself dead and has seven days to decide what he wants to do. He's been murdered, and it has something to do with the photographs he's taken of the war and civil unrest in his country, Sri Lanka. You meet a lot of people he's photographed as he works through his seven days, and see what sort of man Maali was along the way. Unique and captivating and funny.

Maali was dead, to begin with.

From that starting point, Maali—a gay atheist photojournalist of mixed Sinhalese/Tamil background who was caught up in the Sri Lankan civil war—has seven nights (the moons of the title) to figure out how the afterlife works and who killed him. Shehan Karunatilaka's novel is a dark and raucous bit of magical realism that makes for a chaotic read in both good and bad ways.

I'm not a fan of literature told in the second person as this novel is, and Karunatilaka's prose is at times a bit lumpy—there were a number of points where I found myself having to re-read a sentence to fully comprehend it. That said, I never felt there was a moment as if Seven Moons weren't humming along, its action driven by the inevitable deadline of Maali's seventh night, and Karunatilaka's narrative voice is often darkly funny. While imperfect, this is still an engaging read.

A very strange book in the best way. Most sports books that I've read try to get you to identify with a hero, detail the ebb and flow of specific games, and are basically uncritical cheerleaders for their sport. This one does none of that; in fact hardly any cricket is actually played.

The story reminds me of the quote, “I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.” Take that idea, but imagine hearing rumours of one of these people with equal talent, tracing those stories, and trying to disentangle the truth from the deceptions and drunken misremembrances, and you'll get an idea of how romantic W. G.'s quest is.

My offspring and I read this at approximately the same time, one for an in-person book club and one for an online one. For both of us, it was one of those books that we are glad to have read. For me, the journey had a lot of ups and downs, which I need to digest a bit more.

This wins my praises, not because I loved the reading experience, but because it was a smart, creative, skillfully written novel with a powerful story. Totally worthy of the Booker Prize in my opinion.½

Maali Almeida has just died, and was possibly killed because of incriminating photos of atrocities during the Sri Lankan Civil War. But he doesn’t know what happened and the “border control” staff in the afterlife is unable to help. They can only tell him what he needs to do to progress from “the In Between” to “the Light,” should he choose to do so. Maali wants to find out more about how he died, and orchestrate the publication of his photos by communicating with loved ones left behind.

While this is a really intriguing premise, I found this book difficult reading for a number of reasons. There’s a supernatural component involving ghosts and other spirits, which I found a bit hard to follow. I also was quickly confused by the various factions in the war; it was difficult to keep it all straight and know who the “good guys” were (if in fact there were any, which I’m still not sure about). And finally, there was the violence: lots of it, described in detail.

I can understand why this book received critical acclaim, but I can’t say I enjoyed reading it.

DNF 48% in and I'm done. Can't finish. Admittedly this could be me but if I just don't care who killed Maali by now, I can't imagine I ever will. Also, I don't currently have the bandwidth to keep track of all the political groups and history and characters in this story. But mostly it's because I'm just not invested in Maali's story. Ah well.

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.