By Shehan Karunatilaka

Work is sending me to Sri Lanka tomorrow, so I scrambled to check out several travel guides from the library. They weren’t really holding my attention, though, so I had the thought to track down a fictional novel by a Sri Lankan author and set there. Unsurprisingly, the vast majority focus on the long and brutal civil war, and that wasn’t what I was looking for in this particular moment.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida has a fascinating premise, and was described as “bawdy, wisecracking” and “comic, macabre, angry and thumpingly alive,” which seemed more like it. However, it was very much also about the civil war, which upon consideration makes a lot of sense: the 26-year war only ended in 2009, recent enough that it would probably be absurd for any novel to not feature it someway or another. (I also think it worked: I have a much better general sense of the recent history and culture, though I had to frequently remind myself that I was reading a critique of the most negative side.)

The novel opens with Maali Almeida, a photojournalist, arriving in the afterlife, which spotty memories of his life and none of his death. The very bureaucratic helper explains to him that he has seven moons before his chance to move to the next stage, whatever that will be, closes. As he travels around Colombo, revisiting old homes, family, and friends, dodging various other ghosts and demons, pieces of his life come back to him, and he scrambles to make meaning of it before he must go on.

Maali not a very likeable man, though neither is anyone else, and the situation in Sri Lanka is impossible. The tone of the book in general reminded me of Catch-22, in that it was actually quite funny when showing truly horrifying circumstances. Upon reading the first chapter, Rebecca said it reminded her a bit of Slumdog Millionaire, and perhaps there is genre of books that reveal the worst of humanity through the darkest of humor. For all that, though, it ended in a surprisingly optimistic view of humanity and life in general, which caught me off guard but that I really appreciated. (As an aside, the beginning of the book caught me off guard with its second-person present tense, which is an usual style that can be difficult to get into, but I adjusted more quickly than I expected and came to really appreciate it.)