the seven moons of maali almeida reviews

'The most significant work of Sri Lankan fiction in a decade. And as the narrative gathers pace it becomes a whodunnit. But it also gives you a thorough grounding in Sri Lankan politics. With ghosts and spirits in the afterlife, it is part supernatural.

Karunatilaka has done artistic justice to a terrible period in his country’s history.' But the novel also recalls the mordant wit and surrealism of Nikolai Gogol’s Dead Souls or Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita. 'The obvious literary comparisons are with the magical realism of Salman Rushdie and Gabriel García Márquez. 'A mix of mischievous magic realism and absurdist humour. Karunatilaka respects the conventions of all the genres that he piles up so extravagantly.The result is an unexpectedly exhilarating read.' 'There can’t be many novels that simultaneously bring to mind Agatha Christie, Salman Rushdie, Raymond Chandler, John le Carré and Stranger Things―but this one does. Karunatilaka’s novel never courts despair.' 'Comic, macabre, angry and thumpingly alive. ― Randy Boyagoda, New York Times Book Review Readers everywhere will find in such demanding specificity what we all seek from great books: the exciting if overwhelming fullness of an otherwise unknown world told on its own terms, and that frisson of unexpected identification and understanding that comes from working to stay in it.' Like Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, Grass’s Tin Drum and Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, Karunatilaka’s book is supremely confident in its literary heterodoxy, and likewise in offering idiosyncratic particularities of ordinary Sri Lankan life well beyond the serious matters of politics, history, religion and mythology. 'Karunatilaka’s novel breaks with conventional modes of storytelling to reveal humanness in a strange, sprawling, tragic situation.

The seven moons of maali almeida reviews