Maali believes that "these are photos that will bring down governments. Over the years, he has taken thousands of photographs of the carnage, pictures of torched homes, brutal beatings, executions, disappeared journalists and vanished activists. And he wants things to change, for the killings to stop, for the war to end. He wants to remember who killed him, and why. Because, when you forget, nothing changes." But Maali does not want to forget. Maali is told that "every soul is allowed seven moons to wander the In Between. And his 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," Karunatilaka has said. "The disgust Vonnegut felt for humanity and history’s barbarism resonated with the disillusion I felt for my beautiful island and the myopic fools who destroyed it. From the ghosts, vicious or helpful, who use the wind "like public transport for dead people" to travel from the In Between to the earth, to the talking animals, the shadow of the magic realism of Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Salman Rushdie falls large.īut Karunatilaka’s biggest self-confessed influence is Kurt Vonnegut. George Saunders did so in his masterful Lincoln in the Bardo. Setting a novel in this kind of an afterlife is not without precedent.
"The afterlife is a tax office and everyone wants their rebate." The In Between is full of ghosts and ghouls, suicides, people killed and maimed in the war, and a bureaucracy as tedious as the one in the world he has left behind.
He works with the insurgents, the government and foreign journalists and documents, through photographs, the atrocities of war.Īs the novel opens, we find our dead narrator inhabiting the In Between - a sort of afterlife where people go before rebirth. Maali Almeida, the narrator of Shehan Karunatilaka’s remarkable, Booker Prize winning novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, is a "photographer, gambler, slut", a closet gay, and fixer. A brutal civil war is tearing Sri Lanka apart.
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