Review: “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” is a Booker-winning ghost story
For months, I’d been hearing tantalizing, impossibly incongruous details about this novel, which is only now being published in the United States. It’s all true: “The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida” is a murder mystery and a zany comedy about military atrocities.Such a novel doesn’t sound like it has a ghost of a chance, but Karunatilaka is used to beating the odds. Like Salman Rushdie, whose fiction clearly influenced him, Karunatilaka started in advertising.
“You wake up with the answer to the question that everyone asks. The answer is Yes, and the answer is Just Like Here But Worse. That’s all the insight you’ll ever get. So you might as well go back to sleep.” Now, reduced to airy thinness, Maali will find justice only if he can publish a secret cache of his most incendiary pictures, “photos that will bring down governments,” he says, “photos that could stop wars.” Mixed in among his stash of erotic images is evidence of horrific crimes that the Sri Lankan military would kill to keep secret.
That grimly comic voice carries the imprint of Kurt Vonnegut, whom Karunatilaka calls “the genius I have robbed from the most.” In an essay for the Booker Prize Foundation, he said that Vonnegut’s ability “to view tragedy through the lens of the absurd, to blend genres and moods, and to be heart-breaking and hilarious within the space of a sentence, is the gold standard we all aspire to.”
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