![]() ![]() ![]() This tone of exasperated absurdism, reminiscent of Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, reigns throughout, especially in the “cheatsheet” Maali puts together for a foreign journalist: there are the Tamil Tigers, ready to slaughter Tamil civilians to achieve a separate state Marxist revolutionaries who murder the working class the government, abducting and torturing citizens Indian peacekeepers “willing to burn villages to fulfil their mission”. Karunatilaka wrote his national catastrophe as a ghost story, he has said, because “it seemed that only the dead could offer plausible explanations of the Sri Lankan tragedy, as the living clearly did not have a clue”. He’d hoped – “silly old you” – that his pictures could “do for Lanka’s civil war what naked napalm girl did for Vietnam”. ![]() ![]() Death energises the laid-back Maali: his quest over the course of one week or “seven moons” is to find out how he died by haunting those on Earth, but also to guide his boyfriend and best friend Jaki to the photographs he’s surreptitiously taken while working as a fixer for various factions – images revealing the true horror of atrocities committed and the level of foreign and government involvement. ![]()
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