Karunatilaka has repeatedly paid his debt to Kurt Vonnegut and his brand of dark humour that makes the unbearable tenable.What sort of a literary inheritance does a protracted civil war bestow upon a country? If one were to go looking for an answer in Sri Lankan literature, it would seem at odds with the legacy of ethnic and political strife that ravaged the island nation for close to three decades. After all, in the simmering tension in the works of the 1994 Booker-shortlisted Romesh Gunesekera, in the novels of introspection that are the forte of the 2021 nominee Anuk Arudpragasam, and the delicious black humour of this year’s Booker Prize-winning writer Shehan Karunatilaka, what emerges is not a homogenous literary landscape but a latticework of diversity, that unpacks the horrors of war to remarkable individual and universal ends.
Karunatilaka’s second novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, appeared in the subcontinent as Chats with the Dead in 2020, two years before its international release and a decade after his award-winning debut, Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew. The eponymous Maali Almeida, murdered war photographer, punter and still-in-the-closet hipster gay man wakes up dead and has to figure out who his killer could be. Set in 1989, at the height of the civil war in the country, it’s an absurdist murder mystery, irreverent and contradictory — the sort of macabre humour that is both coping mechanism and philosophical representation of the messy, chaotic lives of people who have been privy to unspeakable horrors far too often and far too long.
Karunatilaka has repeatedly paid his debt to Kurt Vonnegut and his brand of dark humour that makes the unbearable tenable. After his win, that makes him only the second Sri Lanka-born writer after Michael Ondaatje to receive the prestigious prize, the 47-year-old expressed his hope for the afterlife of his novel: To be forsaken as political satire and to be consigned instead as fantasy; to be remembered as noir, from whose horrors his country has woken up to a brand new day.