The Birth Lottery and Other Surprises: From the Winner of the Booker Prize 2022 [Hardcover] Karunatilaka, Shehan

A breathtakingly diverse collection. I'm totally in love. Must read.

A new fresh voice telling his story...totally unpretentious so worth befriending.

Fertile soil for speculation- Review of ‘The Birth Lottery and other surprises’ by Shehan KarunatilakaThe imaginative ground ‘The Birth Lottery and other surprises’ is based on could not be more different than the ground reality of Sri Lanka of today. The technological marvels of self driven cars, self driven autos (with surround airbags) and a seemingly-divine utopia that provides decades of peace after a long civil war: all these figments of speculations run through many stories of Karunatilaaka.Although I haven’t read the author’s Booker winner book ‘The seven moons of Maali Almeida’, he is said to be known for his dry wit and humour, both which dance through these stories in full-bodied blossom. Have a look- ‘I savoured the sunsets in the hills, the meals at the club and the evenings with dusky maidens. I gambled seldom and fell to the amber nectar hardly, and thus, saved most of my generous stipend. And then I made the folly that has ruined many free men and will continue to ruin more as long as the skies are blue. I took myself a wife.’Some stories, even as short as a single page, pack a savage punch. One of such stories, even though just one page long (short?) could be the basis of a phd thesis. It deals with the notion how even gods are riddled with the very weight of expectations.Karunatilaka urges you to throw away the order and the sequence and read the stories in chaos because he himself does that. He even categorises his stories to suit the tastes of his readers. He classifies some of them as the stories with a twist while some of them are of the category where nothing happens. There are stories that inspire the presence of God while some allude to godlessness.The stories are dripping with sarcasm, irony, wit and humour. The author finds a way to stick a smile on to the face of his reader, no matter how grim the skeleton of the story he is telling is. There are stories about cats in prisons and dogs on beaches. There are even animals have a philosophical conversation with Buddha. The range of imagination is simply astounding here.The winning of Booker and the subsequent follow up with the publication of a short story collection reminds me of another BIPOC writer who did just that- Aravind Adiga. His The White Tiger was followed by a short story collection ‘Between the assassinations’ that explored the changing times between the assassinations of two Gandhi mother-son PMs. The first story from that collection, where a book seller, despite being beaten by police, doesn’t stop selling banned booked has stayed with me over the years. Adiga’s short stories, as opposed to his debut novel, looked at the humanity with an optimistic gaze, exploring the gentler sides of the humanity. Karunatilaka is in no mood to offer any such good-faith discount to the people. One of his stories, about a self-driven car (yes there are lot of these in an alternate Sri Lanka that the author imagines) that is about to crash is a vehicle that paddles how even machines, obviously programmed by humans, prefer commercial gains to saving humanity. A short story entirely written in the form of text exchanges between a husband and a wife takes bitter and sweet turns so quickly that you don’t know if what’s happening is real or a prank. In Ceylon Islands, a corporate magnate buys islands that float near the equator between Somalia and Maldives and invites brightest of minds to build a new Sri Lanka. He wants to give an experience of Sri Lanka in a place free of Sri Lankan bureaucracy and corruption.But there is a catch- only those of Lankan roots and blood are given a visa. The islands become most successful tourist destination of all time with an annual turnover of 300 billlion. There are hovercrafts, hot air balloons and air taxis to transport the tourists. You could smoke Bluetooth cigarettes or pop pills containing morphine, nicotine and red wine. Notice the audacity of the imagination- that never quite existed.‘By 2028, The Ceylon Islands had been sculpted into the image of a collective dream and boasted a GDP that eclipsed Switzerland and Luxembourg, despite it still being a privately owned conglomerate.’Alas, only if Karunatilaka’s imagination could take hold on the soil of reality. It is in this man-made utopia that a bus full of little school girls has a bomb. One of my favourite quotes is from this story- ‘How does one destroy something based on all that is good and just? It is simple. First add violence. Then add religion.’Then there is story about a Time Machine and other futuristic weapons like gravel guns that fired pebbles to pinpoint accuracy, nigh binoculars with 100x zoom, boots that left no footprints, canisters that turned air moisture to drinkable water, boomerang daggers, elephant repellent, encryption wires and fire rocks: all crafted by Tamilian scientists working for Prabhakaran. Here the keeper of the weapons decides to use the Time Machine for himself, ignoring the warning of a general. Karunatilaka heeds the submission guidelines of Clarksworld that warns the writers to not make the time travel as easy as it is shown in tv and films. In this story, only the scholars with advanced degrees in Physics could travel through the machine or you risk getting splattered on the machine.The stories have a fibre of darkness that sometimes is laced with wicked humour. It’s astounding how someone can find humour even in the most hopeless situations. But what does the time traveller do after he travels into the past? You must find that out.One of the most poignant stories is set in UAE, set around the Lankan nannies hired by rich Lankan emigrants. The nannies are not called by their names but by the name of the person working before them, leat the child gets confused. It shows the human nature at its worst. The girls are beaten or not given enough food. It’s harrowing, the way the writer has woven the story around the dialogues.Ending with the lines that resonate with the titular philosophy-‘What is God's grace? It's all just shit luck. Where we are born. Which houses we get. Nothing is planned. Everything is a sweep ticket.'And one more- ‘Is it better to be a rich man's pampered dog or a poor man's abused child? Is human birth superior without exception to being born a beast? Is beast birth superior to plant or microbe birth? Does every creature think of itself as the centre of the universe?’

I am so blown away by Shehan Karunatilaka!He gifted me this signed book and I started reading after my husband bought it home to me. I could not believe how it shot hope through me reading the chapter on Hugs.You see I get invited all around the world to gatherings of thousands in all walks of life and share hope to people but all wants blessings of prayers, I refuse because I want to hug people.So I end up hugging thousands and watch some weeping, trying to share and I keep hugging, weeks later I get thousands of emails reporting of massive healing, emotional, physical, mental, physical and even in their soul. I am humbled and blessed to be a channel for God to hug through me !

Shehan Karunatilaka nails the art of writing short fiction. He has you hooked right from the get go, talking about how the collection can be/should be read, which is in itself a taster of the wry humour that's about to come in the next few pages. One can see the sheer ingenuity in how he lays out each story. Some are just one-page brilliance, like 'Short Eats'. Some are conversational. Some are text messages. It's the kind of book that keeps giving, and giving something new every time you pick up the book.Love it. Shehan is on to something great. I suppose his Booker win is also testament to that!

You need writers like Karunatilaka to push the boundaries of fictional storytelling, lest it stagnates into age-told styles. His new book of short fiction: ‘The Birth Lottery and other surprises’ imbibes a witty and uncanny tone to present a body of work that is a massive fodder for sustained thought.Karunatilaka takes an expertise in disguising all sorts of uncomfortable innings of life as bite-sized humorous anecdotes. He channelizes his apt attention to a paradoxical, dystopian ugliness that prevails all around us, once we lift the veil of convention. As a result, his stories jump out of the page with astonishing puzzlement, where the reader needs to engage in multiple rounds of observation to get the bottom of the story’s point. He seldom tries to make the stories simple to ease out the reading process. Rather, he inculcates a large number of bizarre elements into his stories, which swiftly move in and out of reality and its peripheries.It takes a while to grasp’s Karunatilaka’s intention behind a majority of the stories. Most of them employ humour to convey something harsh, sarcasm to show light to a hypocrisy, and even straightforwardness to flatten some silly hype. In a well-rounded sense, his book is a way of showing the readers a glimpse of life in modern day Sri Lanka, with its social, political, environmental crises. The general psychological and interpersonal riffs that plagues the world today and pushes us closer to an unflinching fallacy, gets represented in his book very directly.With all being said, the stories are sometimes painful to understand, their wordiness often going overboard. There is a parched dryness in some of the longer stories, where the author (perhaps knowingly) strips the diction off all sorts of literary pleasantness. The intense difficulty to understand the stories weighs in against the pleasure of consuming the book well. The ‘dark humour’ isn’t always executed with sufficient maturity, and many allegorical aspects of the stories are misplaced.

No match for his earlier works Chinaman and Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.