The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida

Starred review from December 1, 2022
A murdered Sri Lankan photojournalist strives to put his afterlife to good use. Karunatilaka's rich, engrossing second novel, the winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, opens with its title character in a post-mortem waiting room in 1990. There, he's informed that he has seven moons (i.e., nights) to remain on Earth as a ghost before entering the Light and the next life. He could head Light-ward right away, but Maali has too many unanswered questions. How was he killed? Who killed him? What has happened to his lover, Dilan, and his best friend, Jaki? And can he somehow tip them off to the location of photos he shot that reveal the depths of the war-torn island's atrocities? With that setup, Karunatilaka's novel is at once a murder mystery and a historical novel of the island nation's violent struggles throughout the '80s. That necessitates explaining a host of ethnic and political factions, plus outside forces from India to the United States, on top of which Karunatilaka layers a host of otherworldly ghouls, demons, and spirits that Maali has to navigate. But despite that complexity, the novel reads smoothly and powerfully, buoyed by Maali's defiant and flawed persona--his weeklong stint as a dead man means reckoning with his sexual promiscuity, gambling habit, and unsettled family as much as the riots and state-sponsored death squads he's strived to expose. Though the novel is maximalist in its plotting, it's intimate in the telling--Karunatilaka writes in the second person to better root the reader in a maelstrom of characters and otherworldly incidents. And the main point gets across: The world is sick with violence and corruption, but truth will out, and the possibility for change exists if we don't succumb to defeatism. A manic, witty, artfully imagined tale of speaking truth to power.

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