The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
I feel recently, not on purpose, that I have been reading a lot of books about the afterlife- or books that go- ‘hey what happens after we die?’ They’re not depressingly philosophical, but rather give a lot of humour to this ever discussed topic.
Maali Almeida
I read this shortly after reading Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (separate blog coming soon). Different to the Seven Moons, The Satanic verses dealt a lot with reincarnation. Seven Moons, is different in the respect, Maali is dead.
Maali Almeida is the central character. He wakes up at the beginning of the novel, dead. After considering he might be high on some drugs he sees he is almost in a ‘celestial visa office’, where people who have died are being processed, with many displaying very gruesome but with some dark humour, how they died.
Seven Moons
In life Maali was once a photographer, capturing the brutality of the insurrections in Sri Lanka in the 1980s/90s. In the afterlife he meets many victims of this political violence.
He learns that Spirits, ( like himself) can go down to earth for the period of seven moons. They can travel wherever their name is being spoken, going by wind, breeze or…car exhausts. They have seven moons to dip into past lives, to recall… then forget.
His main purpose in going down as a spirit is to try and direct his friend Jaki and her cousin (his lover), to a box of photographs under his bed. He believes these photographs could rock Sri Lanka, if published across the largest city, Colombo.
After-life death and acceptance
Maali, not listening to the advice of the celestial administrators, goes a bit crazy with this jumping down to earth thing. To try and influence the world of the living, he gets involved with the ‘wrong crowd’. They are a group of spirits, who refuse to come back after seven moons and instead stay around earth, trying to whisper people into and manipulate further violence against who they don’t like politically.
This was probably my favourite idea in the book, the idea that yeah we’re surrounded by spirits, not in weird scary way, just in the fact there are just a lot hanging in any given place. There is this idea that a person never has an original thought and rather it has just been whispered to them by a spirit, good or bad. This sounds creepy, but the book does it a very amusing way.
Links to other books
The photos as evidence of political crimes/violence reminded me of the Shadow King, that I read a few years ago. That book, also starts with a box of photographs showing evidence of Italy’s massacre’s in 1930’s Ethiopia. The books message, is that physical evidence is needed to record a different history, than that told by the ‘victors’.
The Seven Moons novel is slightly different. We see Maali consciously wants these photos out in the world, to make a name for himself after his death, as well as the political upheaval. Maali wants to be remembered for something after his unexpected death.
As Maali is so set in tying up loose ends in his own life he realises that he can’t really change what has happened, and part of the novel is him coming to terms with that.
Booker Prize
This was the 2022 Booker prize winner, and no I haven’t read the others…yet. I did enjoy it more than Shuggie Bain however…
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