chow is it life after death? Boring, bureaucratic. You find yourself in line like in those clinics with a number, waiting for a doctor to tell you something: for example that you’re dead. Just like that guy, in line like you, holding the broken head on his arm.
In this small room, Maali Almeida, 34 years old, Sri Lankan, war photojournalist, reveler and drinker wakes up out of necessity because the horrors of the ongoing civil war in his country (it’s 1989, the Sri Lankan civil war will end in 2009) unleash nightmares that he must somehow forget. Maali recalls instead that, when he was alive, he had three passions: photography, gambling and men, not necessarily in that order. And he obviously remembers his two loves, who lived with him: Dilan, a beautiful life partner (“the perfect 10”), and Jaki, his best friend, the one who understands him more than anyone else, Jaki who surrendered to the fact that he’s gay but she just can’t stop loving him. And she offers him the necessary “cover” by dating him, because Sri Lanka in the 1980s was a homophobic country.
Unfortunately for Maali, the memories end there: he does not remember who killed him, or why. He only knows what the doctor at the clinic for the dead told him: you have seven moons – that is a week – to put things right from your past life. Seven ghost moons, wandering among living and other ghosts, demons and spirits of Hinduism, trying to understand the circumstances and consequences of your murder, seven moons to protect the future of the people you love, seven moons to decide: in the end you will want to enter the great Light and reincarnate forgetting everything, or you will want to stay on Earth remembering, and wandering like a soul in pain?
Reincarnation, sure. Everyone in Sri Lanka believes in karma and reincarnation: both Sinhalese Buddhists and Tamil Hindus, or rather the two communities that are massacring each other although united by these dogmas. All believers except one: Maali, who was an atheist when alive. What fate will he choose for himself at the end of the seven moons? Maali doesn’t know. But he knows that he must protect Dilan and Jaki: in their house, under his bed, he keeps a dangerous secret, photographs that could “overthrow governments or end wars”. They must not fall into the wrong hands…
Between ghost stories and detective stories
This is just the beginning of The seven moons by Maali Almeida, the surreal and glittering novel by the 48-year-old Sri Lankan Shehan Karunatilaka. Which in 2022 received from the hands of Queen Camilla the Booker Prize. Karunatilaka is the second Sri Lankan to receive the prestigious award, after Michael Ondaatje in 1992 for The English patient (which later became a successful film).
The seven moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka, Fazi Editore, 472 pages, €10.99
Currently in translation in more than 30 countries, The Seven Moons by Maali Almeida it is published in Italy by Fazi in the elegant language of Silvia Castoldi; the author will soon meet the Italian public, as guest of honor of the Festivaletteratura of Mantua on 9 September he was born in Readers’ Club of Turin on 11 September.
The Seven Moons by Maali Almeidawise and funny
Both Anglo-American and Asian literary criticism have compared The Seven Moons by Maali Almeida to great classics of Magic Realism such as Midnight’s Children by Salman Rushdie o One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Márquez, but Karunatilaka avoids that comparison with his usual irony: «Those are the Masters! At whose feet I sit learning. However I don’t feel part of Magical Realism. I can mention many other men and women teachers who have influenced me: Jorge Luis Borges, Italo Calvino, Toni Morrison, Margaret Atwood, Stephen King… But above all Kurt Vonnegut. No one can be as wise and funny and dark and poetic as Uncle Kurt at the same time. I love his classics such as Slaughterhouse n ° 5, but it is the whole of his work that influences me ».
Karunatilaka’s novel is also a mix of genres. Neo-Gothic ghost story. And particular detective story: the dead man and the detective are the same person. But above all it is a political novel that denounces the collective madness of the massacres in the 1980s. “Don’t look for the good ones, because there aren’t any here,” says Maali. The vision of the protagonist is gloomy. The UN peacekeepers? «They have an office in the capital Colombo. Working together are assholes…». Communist revolutionaries? “They want to overthrow the capitalist state. They are ready to murder the proletarians as they try to liberate them.” And so on, no one is saved.
The philosophy of a losing team
Yet there is a salvation, reserved for us readers: over everything and everyone Karunatilaka, through Maali, exerts a wonderful irony. This damned souls novel is damn funny. It’s a masterpiece of a rare art: making people laugh while sitting on rubble. An art of circus tightrope walkers, without a net under the wire. “Black humor is a natural defense mechanism for us Sri Lankans,” continues the author.
«Both of my novels (the first, Chinamanwon the Commonwealth Prize in 2012, ed) they talk about falls and failures and can come across as cynical. In reality they give hope for some form of redemption. I live in a country that has long been on the brink of catastrophe. My vision is like our national cricket team: it doesn’t matter that they lose often, they lose so spectacularly that we continue to cheer for them, we cultivate the dream. And sometimes, it happens.”
The Seven Moons by Maali Almeida is already a real literary case in South Asia: it will be studied as it happened forty years ago a Midnight’s Children by Rushdie, e will finally shed a light on Sri Lankan literatureAnd. “Which has many excellent authors, recognized in all literary genres” concludes Karunatilaka. «Poetesses like Vivimarie Vanderpoorten, who won multiple awards for her collection Nothing Prepares younovelist like Nayomi Munaweera awarded both in Sri Lanka and in the USA, historians like Ameena Hussein, crime writers like Amanda Jayatissa… And I could go on for a long time».
In short, there is a world to discover here. Let’s hope that the Italian publishing houses take notice.
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