Around the World for a Good Book Selection for Sri Lanka
Author: Shehan Karunatilaka
Title: The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Narrator: Shivantha Wijesinha
Publication Info: HighBridge Audio, 2022 
Summary/Review:
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.
Recommended books:
- Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders
- Black Water Sister by Zen Cho
Rating: ***1/2
Panorama of the Mountains 