Reader, do you know that Sri Lanka is a bankrupt country, starving for fuel, medicine and food? That it was the country with the highest suicide rate per capita in 1995? Had a bloody civil war for 30 years? Even if we were to map that island paradise where corpses float like surfboards in a rotten lake, the magnificent novel by 2022 Booker Prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka (Galle, 1975) would deserve to find thousands of readers. There are other incentives: the hero is a ghost who has seven months (one week) to find out who sent him to the other neighborhood (here Middle Earth, a kind of Ministry of Lost Souls), and its sequel is a picaresque novel. and an espionage thriller, a strange experience and a funny and brutal revision of the book in the style of magical realism and, above all, the story of a town trying to build its identity through violence and corruption.
The Seven Months of Maali Almeida is written in the second person singular. It’s a daring decision that marks the reader’s ongoing relationship with his anti-hero, a gambling photojournalist, a closeted homosexual who keeps in a box a series of compromising photographs that are the envy of Tamil guerrillas and members of the Government. The narrator, then, might be something like a guardian ghost, someone who has known Maali since birth, eyes that existed at a stage before language, a privileged reader. That stubborn you, that soul that we all attach to us like a wakeful conscience, that skillfully moves towards omniscience when the time comes, is an example of the technical mastery in Karunatilaka’s prose, which surprises with its biting and disbelieving voice structure. Moving from astonishment to clarity as it transcends the fragile walls that separate reality from its mystical replica, revealing in an extraordinarily didactic way the historical, political and religious complexity of a country that has transformed the slavery of its colonial legacy into a collective structure. Trauma that led to the deaths of 60,000 people.
But Maali Almeida’s Seven Months is also an emotional novel about what it means to enjoy difference in a region rife with extreme intolerance. In the characters of DD, Maali’s on-and-off boyfriend, and her lesbian cousin Jaki, Maali pretends to be his girlfriend, able to enjoy her torrid relationship with DD in hiding, and here she manages to connect the personal in the most powerful way. political. Karunatilaka’s ability to remind us of the strange struggle of 1989, the year in which it is set, is presented as a mystery to be solved in the novel, which never refrains from depicting the brutality of war but stands out with its irreverent humor. This act was admirable, embedded in the stigmatizing AIDS epidemic – which remains an open wound in many countries where freedom is a dream afforded only by ghosts who will happily attain the nirvana of reincarnation.