Shehan Karunatilaka is not one for formalities. He bypasses the Dhaka Lit Fest press room and talks to me out on the lawn, cigarette and coffee in hand, while I am also un-self-consciously wolfing down my lunch. He prefers it this way. The previous day he had cancelled a panel for reasons unknown, and he makes no show of being a people-pleaser. He soaks in the atmosphere observing social detail, and if the recent Booker win has brought him any level of celebrity, it certainly does not show. His latest novel The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is a novel of brutal beauty and one of the most original works to come out of not only South Asia, but anywhere in the world. He is not too hung up on the win: “Just one year earlier it would have lost,” he muses, adding that the time was probably just right.
It is hard to deny that the Sri Lankan novel is having a very special moment. Many years after the civil war, the stories of unspeakable horrors, charred bodies, and a nation ripped apart by contending claims on the land, a new literature is possibly bursting out of Sri Lanka. A few years ago, AnukArudpragasam's debut novel The Story of a Brief Marriage (2016) laid out the miseries of the war in unflinching detail, and while Brief Marriage was austere and relentless, lacking a moment of relief, Karunatilaka brings out the magic, and all the tools in his kit -- many of them never before seen in literature. There is world-building and wordplay, there are ghosts and a highly bureaucratized afterlife, and a secret prison used for torture and extra-judicial killings that will resonate with the Bangladeshi reader aware of the governmental wrong-doings that take place in our own country.
Was there a danger in writing about Sri Lanka while being based in Sri Lanka? So many novelists from this part of the world, after all, are diasporic, but Karunatilaka wears his uncertainty with grace. Perhaps there will be trouble, some day, he says. Certainly the situation in Sri Lanka has been unstable, with trouble on and off, so who knows. There is chaos and confusion regarding the future, no doubt, and as he said in a panel on the first day: “The information is all out there, but we don't have a consensus”
I draw a thematic comparison to Salman Rushdie, for who we share an admiration -- back in 1981 Rushdie blew open the roof when it came to possibilities for fiction to tell the story of India in a certain way: Magic and the supernatural woven seamlessly into historical trauma. A particularly hyperbolic review at the time wrote: “Midnight's Children feels like a continent finding its voice.” Could The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida be Sri Lanka finding its voice, after a very long time? Many in the international community, even in nations which are close cousins -- like Bangladesh and India -- are unaware of the complications of the struggle. In fact, an earlier draft of the book, then named Chats with the Dead, had to be rewritten to give a clearer picture of the conflict to a global audience.
So could this, then, this be a new sort of “big bang” for the Sri Lankan novel, with the likes of Karunatilaka and Arudpragasam leading the way? Could it be a new generation's Midnight's Children? Karunatilaka neither brushes off the question as fanciful, nor does he find such a comparison obvious. He considers it for a moment, trying to find the no-BS answer: “I hope so,” he says, taking another insouciant puff of his cigarette. “It's time.”
