the seven moons of maali almeida book review

Once he realises that he has been killed, he wants to know by whom and why. He has seven moons in which to decide on his future or he would be stuck forever in the In Between with other ghosts and demons of various kinds. He has no memory of how he died and has no urge to transit fully to the Light and/or other lifetimes. The novel begins after his death! He wakes up (dead) in some office in the hereafter and thinks that he is hallucinating. He is a war photographer, an inveterate gambler, and gay.

The protagonist of the novel is Maali Almeida, son of a Sinhalese father and a burgher mother.

This is the Sri Lanka of the civil wars (with the LTTE in the north and JVP in the south), of murder and mayhem, where the number of the dead rises exponentially, where the boundaries are so porous that you don’t know who is fighting or colluding with whom. This second novel (Booker Prize winner this year) is hugely comic, an intense satire, a scathing critique of the Sri Lanka of the 1980s and, since not much has changed anywhere, of contemporary times. I have always been impressed by the works awarded the (Sri Lankan) Gratiaen Prize, a prize that should have more visibility and enable better circulation of the prize-winning books in our country. His first novel, ‘Chinaman’, won the Commonwealth Prize, the DSL, and the Gratiaen Prize. SHEHAN KARUNATILAKA is the rock star of Sri Lankan writing in English.

The seven moons of maali almeida book review