The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, about a photographer during Sri Lanka’s civil war, has tremendous comic energy
• Shehan Karunatilaka wins Booker prize for The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
The remarkable thing about this violence-soaked novel narrated by a dead man is how full of life it is. Shehan Karunatilaka’s 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’s 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’s also an offbeat love story, both romantic and platonic, and a whodunnit written in the urgent, intimate second person.
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’s 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’s Inferno.
