The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida tells the story of Malinda Albert Kabalana Almeida, a professional photographer and a “fixer” for the foreign press covering the war, son of a Sinhalese father and a Eurasian Burgher mother, the second person “you” narrator of the novel. The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, Shehan Karunatilaka (WW Norton, November 2022 Sort of Books, August 2022) As Sri Lanka and the world approach 2023, the forty-year anniversary of the civil war, Karunatilaka’s novel and the Booker award underscore the presence and power of literary art as remembrance and historical witnessing. The Indian prime minister Rajiv Gandhi was assassinated by LTTE sympathizers in 1991 in India for India’s military intervention in the civil war on the side of the government in the form of the Indian Peace Keeping Force (IPKF). Many were displaced overseas never to return to the island. It is estimated by various national and international human rights organizations that thousands of Sri Lankans both Tamil and Sinhalese, were killed in the 26-year war that ended in 2009 with the government defeating the LTTE. Shehan Karunatilaka is the first Sri Lankan author to win the Booker, and the Sri Lankan civil war was a consequential genocide in modern history. The novel is smart, it is funny, it is moving but it is ultimately the heinous territory of genocide, torture, dismemberment, beheadings, and assassinations that we traverse. In particular, the novel concerns itself with the unspeakable atrocities of the Tamil pogrom in July 1983, when, in the violent confrontation between the Liberation Tamil Tigers of Eelam (LTTE), the government, the military, and the Marxist radicals, hundreds of Tamil citizens were violently executed and burned to death in their homes and out in the streets. But Karunatilaka’s dead narrator tells his story skillfully and vivaciously with deadpan humor mixed in with unnerving descriptions of the Tamil genocide committed during the Sri Lankan civil war of the 1980s. This, in itself, is a striking fact about this novel as the second person pronoun is a difficult narrative voice to sustain meaningfully and entertainingly for nearly four hundred pages.
A dead person who addresses himself in the second person “you” for the entirety of the novel is the narrator of Shehan Karunatilaka’s 2022 Booker Prize winning novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
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