The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

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.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka