Tag: Sri Lanka setting

Shehan Karunatilaka’s—The seven moons of Maali Almeida *****

Reviews from the Guardian and the Times referred to this novel as “often funny” and crediting the story with “tremendous imagination.” I couldn’t disagree more. It appeared as if these reviewers knew nothing about Sri Lankan history because there was nothing funny about thousands of bodies hacked to pieces so they couldn’t be identified and dumped into a Colombo lake. Nor anything imaginative about these facts because that’s what they were—historical facts. What was clever about Karunatalaka’s writing was that Almeida, his main character is killed, and oversees these crimes as a ghost thereby telling the tale from an omnipotent viewpoint.

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Shyam Selvadurai’s — Funny boy *****

Arjie is a young Tamil boy unsure of his identity in Sri Lanka’s capital, Colombo. When racial riots break out in 1983 with the burning and killing of Tamils and their property, Arjie’s life is in danger.

Although this was Selvadrai’s debut novel, its tale has stayed with me more than any other of his more recent novels. To me it’s still his finest work.

Shyam Selvadurai’s — The hungry ghosts *****

When Shivan prepares to return to Colombo to bring his aging grandmother to Canada, memories of his childhood flood back. He remembers how he was the one forced to befriend the greedy and callous matriarch so his widowed mother and sister would not be kicked out of her house. He suffers her beatings and insults because his grandmother despises his mother for marrying a Tamil and producing two half Tamil children.

Set through an era of political hatred towards the Tamil minority (that still persists to day) and grappling with Shivan’s sexual orientation, this is a story wrought with tension on many levels.