I was waiting for the Polish version of the “Seven Moons of Male Almeida” by Shehan Karunatilak – and here it is, in a large translation by Mariusz Gądek (Marginsy Publishing). I read on the cover of what this fresh associated Michael Nogasi (and earlier – a reviewer from the fresh York Times). Marquez and Rushdie – due to the fact that vengeful spirits and magical realism, Bulhakov – most likely due to grotesque but “Stranger Things”? I place this fresh between “Frankenstein in Baghdad” by Ahmed Saadawi and “Djins” by Fatma Aydemir.
Photo source: Marginy Publishing House
No wonder the author from Sri Lanka got Booker behind the 7 Moons. This is simply a large fordmontological combination of a detective fresh with a political fiction that can be read as a crime story, a love story, but besides a surviving communicative of the latest of the erstwhile Ceylon (Lanki from “Ramaiana”). Speaking of the Syngalez civilian War with the Tamils, Karunatilak condemns fanaticism. The motto is: “There are only 2 deities worthy of worshiping them. Case and electricity’.
It seems a amazing choice, due to the fact that "Seven moons" are derived from Hinduism, but the omnipresence of rahu, yaka, prets with purple skin and demons with red eyes is alternatively folklore, and religion is replaced by ethics (Mahakali is the Dead Priest with whom Maali talks about the theodicea).
Karunatilak talks about murders, torture, persecution, and human dramas, but much in his fresh of humor and irony that do not bridge the message. On the contrary, they strengthen them.
Colombo, the erstwhile capital and largest city of Sri Lanka, 1990. Maali Almeida – bon vivant, kamikaze, hustler and gay, war photojournalist (if he had a card, it would have written “Photographer. Gambler. Slut) – wakes up in between. He doesn't remember how he died. At the Kafkovsky office where the dead are crowded, he learns that he has a week (titled 7 moons) to close earthly affairs. He will gotta decide whether to go to the Light (“the 1 You Need”) or become a demon and join the rebellious spirits that plan bloody vengeance on politicians and cleaners. He'll aid his friends, leave something behind, find out who killed him.
Maal's soul is fought for by the assistant of the dead, Dr. Ranee Sridharan, murdered by Tamil extremists Tamilk with average views and a ghost, a rebel of Sen Pathiran of the JVP (People's Liberation Front; according to the unfavorable spirit: “communist scum of the JVP. The dead, and he is inactive talking about the revolution. ” “Our afterlife has been invented to keep the masses in the foolishness [...]. They make you forget your life and push you towards any light. They're all bourgeois oppressors. They tell you that injustice is part of any large plan. And this does not let you to rebel” – it tempts Sena.
“When you were having fantasies about heaven, you imagined that Elvis or Oscar Wilde would welcome you there. Not a dead prof. with an accounting book. Or a murdered Marxist in a cape" – jokes double the narrator.
Karunatilak chose a diadic communicative which, according to research, is more active with the reader. Magdalena Rembowska-Płuciennik defines it as a peculiar form of secondary narrative, in which ‘you’ means both the protagonist and the recipient (i.e. it does not happen in the address only function). "In terms of the doctrine of the mind, 1 can see in narratives utilizing the "you" kind of bridge over, it would seem, the impenetrable boundary between the first-person position of the working and third-person position of the observer" – explains Rembowska.
This “narrational doubling of the self” is not always justified by plots, but in the “Seven moons” is not just an experimentation and a “strange”. Maali is simply a hybrid – his father was Syngalez, his parent is half Storm and half Tamil. He is gay, but sitting in a closet (he lives with a girl but sleeping with her cousin). As a spirit and mediator, he is both a homo- and a heterodigget (a individual who belongs and does not belong to the planet presented). His soul is undergoing psychomachia (good fights against evil, but there is no annoying moralizing here), and Sri Lanka is under civilian war.
The grotesqueness of the 7 Moons is subversive. Shenan Karunatilak masterfully combines in his literary monster Frankenstein comicism with tragedy, lofty seriousness with plebeic humour. There are moments erstwhile the reader's skin is patiently on his back, but there are moments where you can't not laugh. For example: “You encounter 5 children of soldiers fighting in the Tiger ranks, and they were brought to Colombo to interrogate and be rehabilitated. In prison, the kids found a gift and burned tea from her flowers. All 5 of us are thrilled with life after death (“no 1 yells at us and gives us no orders”) and jumps off the roof joyfully like a group of kindergarteners.”
Seven moons begin and end with amnesia. After all, Maali fights for memory – there are pictures he has been doing for the government, the Associated Press and humanitarian organizations for years. The envelopes contain "photographs depicting the barbarianity of India in the north of the island in the eighty-nineth, Tamil cruelty in the east in the eighty-seventh, and Syngalez savagery in the south in the eighty-third". Photos of murdered journalists, kidnapped activists, beaten clergy. But not only – Maali besides photographed "perfect tens": beautiful men, golden beaches and tea hills ("Because this island, although full of fools and barbarians, inactive remains a beautiful place").
The large subject of “Seven moons” is repetitiveness – eternal return. In a conversation with Maali, a demon called Dead Protector reaches out to the chronicle of Mahawans to tell about the “cursed land” and the battles of indigenous Lankans. The curse of the Queen of Naga's people lasts over 2,000 years.
How does that relate to gambling motive? Read it. It's a large novel! possibly Margins will order the translation “Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew”? The protagonist of Karunatilak's debut is simply a sports gonzo-journalist, an alcoholic, seeking a missing cricket star.
Image author: Eddy Billard
