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Loading... The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida (2022)by Shehan Karunatilaka
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. 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 During these seven days, Maali tries to help his friends to find his negatives of unpublished photos that will reveal the brutality and the government officials that are responsible.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. 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. 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. 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.
A photographer in the afterlife sets out to expose the carnage of Sri Lanka’s civil wars in a Booker-nominated novel filled with humour and pathos....The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, returns to 1980s Sri Lanka, and similarly has a debauched protagonist. Maali, the son of a Sinhalese father and a burgher mother, is an itinerant photographer who loves his trusted Nikon camera; a gambler in high-stakes poker; a gay man and an atheist. And at the start of the novel, he wakes up dead....The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is written in the second person, which gives the narrative a slightly distancing effect, but it’s compensated for by the sardonic humour....The scenarios are often absurd – dead bodies bicker with each other – but executed with a humour and pathos that ground the reader. Beneath the literary flourishes is a true and terrifying reality: the carnage of Sri Lanka’s civil wars. Karunatilaka has done artistic justice to a terrible period in his country’s history. AwardsDistinctionsNotable Lists
Fiction.
Literature.
An Instant National Bestseller Winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a searing satire set amid the mayhem of the Sri Lankan civil war. Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida-war photographer, gambler, and closet queen-has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. In a country where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers, and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest. But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to the photos that will rock Sri Lanka. Ten years after his prize-winning novel Chinaman established him as one of Sri Lanka's foremost authors, Shehan Karunatilaka is back with a "thrilling satire" (Economist) and rip-roaring state-of-the-nation epic that offers equal parts mordant wit and disturbing, profound truths. No library descriptions found.
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The premise sounded interesting but the pacing is slow - dude is literally just Chilling and having gay ghost chats about the psychology and spirituality of circumcised dicks. I was expecting more poltergeist-ing and getting vengeance/finishing unfinished business. I’m sure it gets there eventually but I’m just too bored to push through 12 more hours.