He is also gay and closeted at the height of the HIV-AIDS epidemic.
He is not an idealist, but he is open to new ideas and often “in the wrong place holding a camera”. In life, he is a photojournalist, well-connected and keen to report to the world everything he knows and how he has seen it. There is a plot: it is 1989, the height of the complex and brutal civil war in Sri Lanka and Maali, beautiful, smart, arrogant finds himself dead, in line with other recent dead, waiting to be moved on. Karunatilaka also acknowledges an “uncle Kurt”, and Kurt Vonnegut’s MO, the methodical chaos, is a constant. Karunatilaka has acknowledged Saunders’ brilliant novel as an influence, but his bureaucracy is his own brilliant invention. It is the Tibetan word for an interim, provisional world where the dead must wait before rebirth, so there’s a bit of movement between worlds possible. “Bardo” is the most useable, less-cliched version of this world. Not that there is anything novelistically new about this holding pen George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, Steve Toltz’s Here Goes Nothing and, my choice, Elif Shafik’s Ten Minutes, Thirty Eight Seconds in this Strange World, laid some groundwork.
Shehan Karunatilaka’s novel may be set in the afterlife but it is shockingly funny.
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