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Dva roky, osm měsíců a jednadvacet nocí
New York zasáhne katastrofální bouře a převrátí naruby město i život jeho obyvatel. Je to začátek vlny „podivna�, která změní tvář celého světa a promění ho v bojiště nadpřirozených sil. Během následujícího tisíce a jedné noci � dvou let, osmi měsíců a osmadvaceti dnů � se v zápase o všechno utká dobro a zlo, světlo a temnota. Zachrání civilizaci s jejími sny, ambicemi i obyčejnými lidskými životy princezna džinů Dunia se svými potomky, počatými před dávnými časy a nyní povolanými do války proti zákeřným běsům? Nespoutaný příběh inspirovaný poetikou orientálních pohádek i dobrodružných ság moderní popkultury, vyžaduje ochotu poddat se autorově bezbřehé imaginaci. Svérázným způsobem však odráží i rostoucí výbušnost a nepředvídatelnost světa, který nás reálně obklopuje.
333 pages, Hardcover
First published September 8, 2015
1,513 people are currently reading
22.5k people want to read
About the author
Salman Rushdie
190books12.6kfollowersSir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is an Indian-born British and American novelist. His work often combines magic realism with historical fiction and primarily deals with connections, disruptions, and migrations between Eastern and Western civilizations, typically set on the Indian subcontinent. Rushdie's second novel, Midnight's Children (1981), won the Booker Prize in 1981 and was deemed to be "the best novel of all winners" on two occasions, marking the 25th and the 40th anniversary of the prize.
After his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie became the subject of several assassination attempts and death threats, including a fatwa calling for his death issued by Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran. In total, 20 countries banned the book. Numerous killings and bombings have been carried out by extremists who cite the book as motivation, sparking a debate about censorship and religiously motivated violence. In 2022, Rushdie survived a stabbing at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York.
In 1983, Rushdie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was appointed a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in 1999. Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him 13th on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States. He was named Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University in 2015. Earlier, he taught at Emory University. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he published Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life in the wake of the events following The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in April 2023.
Rushdie's personal life, including his five marriages and four divorces, has attracted notable media attention and controversies, particularly during his marriage to actress Padma Lakshmi.
After his fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), Rushdie became the subject of several assassination attempts and death threats, including a fatwa calling for his death issued by Ruhollah Khomeini, the supreme leader of Iran. In total, 20 countries banned the book. Numerous killings and bombings have been carried out by extremists who cite the book as motivation, sparking a debate about censorship and religiously motivated violence. In 2022, Rushdie survived a stabbing at the Chautauqua Institution in Chautauqua, New York.
In 1983, Rushdie was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. He was appointed a Commandeur de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres of France in 1999. Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for his services to literature. In 2008, The Times ranked him 13th on its list of the 50 greatest British writers since 1945. Since 2000, Rushdie has lived in the United States. He was named Distinguished Writer in Residence at the Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute of New York University in 2015. Earlier, he taught at Emory University. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2012, he published Joseph Anton: A Memoir, an account of his life in the wake of the events following The Satanic Verses. Rushdie was named one of the 100 most influential people in the world by Time magazine in April 2023.
Rushdie's personal life, including his five marriages and four divorces, has attracted notable media attention and controversies, particularly during his marriage to actress Padma Lakshmi.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 2,031 reviews
August 12, 2015
This is my first Rushdie book and I do intend to check out his more famous and controversial works - and - but I have a lot of mixed feelings about my first venture into his world.
As far as I know, Mr Rushdie writes in English, correct? But even though there are some instances of beautiful writing, much of this story feels like a clunky translation. The third person "history of the jinn" that we get is, for the most part, coldly distant and reads like a text book history. The story itself is interesting, but there was little to no emotional pull.
It also should be noted that "magical realism", in this case, seems like an attempt to make the book sound more literary than mere "fantasy". But I think when jinn and their offspring are living in our world with their special powers, we just tend to call that "urban fantasy" these days. Though I suppose that sounds distinctly less Booker prize-worthy.
The foundation of the story is actually quite an exciting fairy tale. Many years ago, a jinn princess called Dunia fell in love with a mortal man. Because the jinn absolutely love sex (we are told this so many times that I grew tired of hearing it, though I think it's supposed to be amusing), they produced many broods of children over a span of two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights, which, if you add it up, makes a grand total of 1,001 nights. I see what you did there, Mr Rushdie!
When her mortal lover dies, Dunia slips back into the jinn realm, leaving her offspring behind her. Years and generations later, random people in the future start to find that they have weird powers but, of course, they are not random. These descendents of Dunia will have a huge part to play in an oncoming war against the forces of evil (dark jinn).
The book is filled with metaphor and symbolism, with underlying themes of migration, civilization, faith and science. It unites old Arabic mythology with modern pop culture in a unique mixture that contains a subtle comedy:
Aside from my feelings about the long passages of info-heavy text book jinn history, I did quite enjoy it. It's a complex, dense and thoughtful story, but it never takes itself too seriously.
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As far as I know, Mr Rushdie writes in English, correct? But even though there are some instances of beautiful writing, much of this story feels like a clunky translation. The third person "history of the jinn" that we get is, for the most part, coldly distant and reads like a text book history. The story itself is interesting, but there was little to no emotional pull.
It also should be noted that "magical realism", in this case, seems like an attempt to make the book sound more literary than mere "fantasy". But I think when jinn and their offspring are living in our world with their special powers, we just tend to call that "urban fantasy" these days. Though I suppose that sounds distinctly less Booker prize-worthy.
The foundation of the story is actually quite an exciting fairy tale. Many years ago, a jinn princess called Dunia fell in love with a mortal man. Because the jinn absolutely love sex (we are told this so many times that I grew tired of hearing it, though I think it's supposed to be amusing), they produced many broods of children over a span of two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights, which, if you add it up, makes a grand total of 1,001 nights. I see what you did there, Mr Rushdie!
Nobody noticed or cared that one day she turned sideways and slipped through a slit in the world and returned to Peristan, the other reality, the world of dreams where jinn periodically emerge to trouble and bless mankind.
When her mortal lover dies, Dunia slips back into the jinn realm, leaving her offspring behind her. Years and generations later, random people in the future start to find that they have weird powers but, of course, they are not random. These descendents of Dunia will have a huge part to play in an oncoming war against the forces of evil (dark jinn).
The book is filled with metaphor and symbolism, with underlying themes of migration, civilization, faith and science. It unites old Arabic mythology with modern pop culture in a unique mixture that contains a subtle comedy:
Travel was already a problem, and would become a much bigger one. He had already ruled out air travel. He might strike a TSA officer as constituting some sort of threat. Only aircraft were permitted to take off at airports. A passenger trying to do so without boarding a plane could very easily be seen as acting improperly and needing to be restrained. Other forms of public transportation were also problematic. In the subway his levitation might be mistaken for an illegal effort to vault the turnstiles.
Aside from my feelings about the long passages of info-heavy text book jinn history, I did quite enjoy it. It's a complex, dense and thoughtful story, but it never takes itself too seriously.
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January 30, 2022
I would like to preface my review of this sprawling, multi-layered, fantastical novel by reiterating my deep admiration for Sir Salman Rushdie and his writing. The man is a literary deity touched by genius; he bites his thumb at social and religious taboos and laughs in the face of literary propriety.
Perhaps idealistically I approach each of his novels with the high expectation that he might one day recoup the enchantment of Midnight’s Children (his crowning glory). Sadly, this never happens.
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is an ambitious novel, perhaps too ambitious. The story is allegorical and mystical: portals open in bedrooms through which exist fabled places where the laws of the universe cease to operate and where there are fascinating characters aplenty (I liked Yasmeen, the intrasexual, who had lightning bolts tattooed where her eyebrows once were).
I'm happy to report that the great man still possesses an unrestrained imagination; the story is extravagant and whimsical and, in a departure from his mainstay of magical realism, he even strays into sci-fi territory.
However, it does ramble on a bit - and I'm the kind of reader whose mind begins to drift if a book doesn't hold his attention. This shortcoming in my powers of concentration was best exposed at school in any one of those frequent instances where I'd be roused from a lovely daydream by a teacher snapping a question at me: "Ansbro!" They'd bellow, while I floundered like a fish caught in a net, prompting 'helpful' classmates to whisper deliberately wrong answers in my direction� "Christopher Columbus, sir!" I once answered a Crimean War question as my history teacher turned puce with rage and the classroom erupted in laughter.
So if you similarly have the attention span of a goldfish, then this book won't likely be for you.
Perhaps idealistically I approach each of his novels with the high expectation that he might one day recoup the enchantment of Midnight’s Children (his crowning glory). Sadly, this never happens.
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is an ambitious novel, perhaps too ambitious. The story is allegorical and mystical: portals open in bedrooms through which exist fabled places where the laws of the universe cease to operate and where there are fascinating characters aplenty (I liked Yasmeen, the intrasexual, who had lightning bolts tattooed where her eyebrows once were).
I'm happy to report that the great man still possesses an unrestrained imagination; the story is extravagant and whimsical and, in a departure from his mainstay of magical realism, he even strays into sci-fi territory.
However, it does ramble on a bit - and I'm the kind of reader whose mind begins to drift if a book doesn't hold his attention. This shortcoming in my powers of concentration was best exposed at school in any one of those frequent instances where I'd be roused from a lovely daydream by a teacher snapping a question at me: "Ansbro!" They'd bellow, while I floundered like a fish caught in a net, prompting 'helpful' classmates to whisper deliberately wrong answers in my direction� "Christopher Columbus, sir!" I once answered a Crimean War question as my history teacher turned puce with rage and the classroom erupted in laughter.
So if you similarly have the attention span of a goldfish, then this book won't likely be for you.
June 10, 2021
You Ain't Ever Had a Friend, Never Had a Friend, Like Me
Rushdie's OutRaged Roaring: All Religions are Mere Fairy Tales, Believed Only by Dupes
I looked forward to enjoying a fantastic novel, with a premise full of promise. As it turned out though, I was repulsed by Rushdie's attempt to aim "brilliant" fire at all religions and their "wholly ignorant" followers. He misfired with what turns out, ironically, a preachy "fauxfun" in an allegorical tale a la Ali Baba. This tale (or, should I say, platform) fills itself venomously with disdainful aphorisms and interminable, repetitive and brazen condemnations of (again) organized religions.
The jinn female protagonist Dunia returns to Earth to save and call to arms her cartoonish descendants, including a comic book writer and his animated superhero character, against the forces of evil.
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is neither clever nor funny. No intelligent reader needs Rushdie or his fiction to learn that millions have been killed in the name of religion. My experience on Earth has been that evil, fear and ignorance exist in all forms, shapes and religions or lack of any religion.
It's inexcusable for Rushdie to use these tragedies to convince us to take the logical leap from the existence of religious fanaticism, hatred and ignorance to the insupportable conclusion that all "religions are based on fairy tales"; it's even more absurd, myopic and insulting to our intelligence to have us deduce that all religion is detrimental per se to society.
In a scene near novel's end, Rushdie graphically describes an evil jinn's ability to take a lion's form having a barbed reproductive organ that shreds a female jinn's insides upon exiting. Gross, I know. Some of us who spent top dollar and several days reading this book that abused our indulgence by repeatedly insulting our intelligence and ridiculing us and anyone who shares our religious beliefs (or, indeed, anyone who believes in a God or in life after death) may share that feeling, figuratively speaking?
Rushdie's OutRaged Roaring: All Religions are Mere Fairy Tales, Believed Only by Dupes
I looked forward to enjoying a fantastic novel, with a premise full of promise. As it turned out though, I was repulsed by Rushdie's attempt to aim "brilliant" fire at all religions and their "wholly ignorant" followers. He misfired with what turns out, ironically, a preachy "fauxfun" in an allegorical tale a la Ali Baba. This tale (or, should I say, platform) fills itself venomously with disdainful aphorisms and interminable, repetitive and brazen condemnations of (again) organized religions.
The jinn female protagonist Dunia returns to Earth to save and call to arms her cartoonish descendants, including a comic book writer and his animated superhero character, against the forces of evil.
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is neither clever nor funny. No intelligent reader needs Rushdie or his fiction to learn that millions have been killed in the name of religion. My experience on Earth has been that evil, fear and ignorance exist in all forms, shapes and religions or lack of any religion.
It's inexcusable for Rushdie to use these tragedies to convince us to take the logical leap from the existence of religious fanaticism, hatred and ignorance to the insupportable conclusion that all "religions are based on fairy tales"; it's even more absurd, myopic and insulting to our intelligence to have us deduce that all religion is detrimental per se to society.
In a scene near novel's end, Rushdie graphically describes an evil jinn's ability to take a lion's form having a barbed reproductive organ that shreds a female jinn's insides upon exiting. Gross, I know. Some of us who spent top dollar and several days reading this book that abused our indulgence by repeatedly insulting our intelligence and ridiculing us and anyone who shares our religious beliefs (or, indeed, anyone who believes in a God or in life after death) may share that feeling, figuratively speaking?
December 13, 2015
Everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale.
Our lives are stories encased in a giant Matryoshka doll. An endless saga of happenings that jumps narration from one brand of mystery to the next bland stamp in the potpourri of the decaying universe. Our timelines cross each other’s endlessly entwining with the myriad strangenesses that are our stories: our individual stories, the stories of the street we grew up on, our family stories, and so on. Human beings are but ‘disintegrating clods of earth� and life a brief respite from nothingness. Reality is a fiction written by each individual, so fantasy is real and the material is fantasy. We are all Sheherazades and our lives are built on a loop of two years,eight months and twenty eight days, or if you will : a thousand and one night.
Set in a comical counterpart of New York City, this giant hotch potch of a fantasy is a love letter to the unlikely heroes. Duniazat (the tribe of the world), the descendants of Dunia who is the grand princess of the Jinniri and is in possession of the magic of lightning, has the audacious distinction of being born without earlobes. The story unfolds as a cataclysmic storm breaks over the city and heralds an era of strangenesses. Among these remove from the normal,the most potent perhaps and definitely the most important is Geronimo Manezes, a gardnener born in Mumbai who loses contact with the earth. He starts levitating. As the distance between him and the terra grows, so do the incidences of strangenesses start multiplying. There is a baby found abandoned at the doorstep of the Mayor’s who can reveal corruption by the touch. Then there is also the nose that is found strolling down the street perfectly free and wily, now that it didn’t have his master’s eyes looking down on him nomore. It is the best of times and it is the worst of times.
The Matryoshka doll of narratives in this fantastical retelling of the Thousand and One Nights by an unknown, unnamed Schererazade, pits reason against religion and performs the oldest war of all times, the simplest and the ultimately the best of all: good versus evil. As the slits between Peristan(fairyland) and Earth open up, jinnis venture into the human world. Now much is known of the Jinnis in legend (but previously discarded by our ancestors as mere ‘stories�. What do they know. Pfft!) but most conspicuously that engage in endless carnal relations all the hours of the day and without prejudice, even relative to the family tree and because they are whimsical beings having no form they despise the humans with their endless striving towards destiny, structure, etc etc. Thus, the two legged inhabitants of the lower world become their battleground as the good jinnis fight the bad and the humans become their best field tests.
As comical and fantastical as the story might seem at first, it isn’t hard to derive the inspirations behind the stories rooted in this material world. The financial breakdown, religious extremism, the disgrace of the philosopher. All of these prove that the story might not be as far off the tangent as it looks at first sight. In here, Rushdie pulls the unreal and the real into a single idea of coherence. The discord between our real past and the imagined history is playfully narrated and his direction on the matter of religion as on the point as ever. In the battle between the Jinns and the two dead philosophers, religion and reason cross swords and as much as his own beliefs might veer one way, the argument to be made in favour is left quite open. He discusses the matter of good versus evil, by way of the dark Jinn being able to influence man by whispering into their hearts. Whereas the good Jinn can also bend humans to their will, the power of the dark is more potent. Is it because the humans are more attuned ready to fall over to the dark side, is left for the readers to decide.
“Our group takes what I'll call a Post-Atheist stance. Our position is that god is a creation of human beings, who only exists because of the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle. If enough people were sensible enough not to clap hands, then this Tinker Bell god would die. However, unfortunately, billions of human beings are still prepared to defend their belief in some sort of god-fairy, and, as a result, god exists. What’s worse is that he is now running amok.�
However,Two Years... is not a tale of doom. Whereas a dystopian ficton could easily have been the result of this tale, rather it is a tale of the triumph of good nature and the simple heroes who save the day. In the world churned by catasptropic events , it might even call for the insignificant individual to dare to raise arms against the mighty Ifrits and dispel darkness. After all isn’t that what most fantasy tales, graphic novels and simply stories tell? Of the simple man who wakes up one day and finds the fate of the world in his hands. Of the unlikely hero to save the day. I love stories that boil down to this simplistic detail.
“The enemy is stupid. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate."
January 14, 2020
"All our stories contain the stories of others and are themselves contained within larger, grander narratives."
As a first draft, this playful adult fairytale of high jinx and low jinn promises much.
As a finished novel, it’s as capricious and shape-shifting as the jinn therein.
Enjoyable at first, but progressively less so.
I was glad when I closed the pages for the last time, with the hopeful finality of stuffing a jinn in a tightly sealed bottle.
�The subject kept changing, and how could anyone live in a crazy situation in which nothing remained the same for five minutes and no narrative was ever driven through to its conclusion, there could be no meaning� only absurdity.�
Image: Cartoon of cat rubbing against jinn’s lamp (.)
Magical Realist Comic Book Fairytale Philosophy
The book explores the inherent contradiction of its magical realism genre: the eternal battle of faith versus fact, especially the 12th century feud about the incoherence of philosophers between rationalist (aka Averroes), and Islamic theologian . Its emphasis on the power of stories to understand our world elevates it beyond the “religion is bad, science is good� binary. The spoonful of sugar to make the philosophy go down includes jinn, giants, transformations, reincarnation, possession, levitation, lightning, jewels, fights, wishes, love, betrayal, and sex.
The main story is mostly in and around contemporary New York, and covers 1001 nights during which the slits between our world and Peristan/Fairyland reopen, and “strangeness� becomes commonplace.
The new strangeness is different from the general types “of American crazy� that include gun crazy, knife crazy, drug crazy, Westbro Baptist Church crazy, and (in 2015!) �Trump crazy�. Now, people become detached from places, beliefs, countries, language, honour, truth, and the ground, and there is separation between author and subject, cause and effect, rich and poor, words and meanings.
At first, the jinn just tinker with reality for their own amusement, but then the dark ones start the War of the World to rid the planet of humans. Dunia, a jinnia princess and mother of dozens of children with Ibn Rushd 800 years earlier, wants to save their descendants, so arouses dormant powers in a handful so they can help.
Image: Ibn Rushd in a detail from The Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas by Benozzo Gozzoli. (.)
Ingredients and Indigestion
It’s narrated by our descendants (anonymous plural “we�), 1001 years in the future:
�A history infused with and perhaps overwhelmed by legend�.
There are stories within stories of the numerous characters (human, jinn, and mixed heritage, as well as comic book superheroes), and the stories they tell.
Exposition is unsubtle. Some sections read like entries from a badly written encyclopaedia of mythology:
"... our ancestors, for whom the arrival in the midst of their everyday life of the implacable forces of the metamorphic, the descending avatars of transformation, represented a shocking disruption in the fabric of the real...."
And that’s just part of the sentence!
Muslims, Christians, and Jews feature, and although it’s clear Rushdie dislikes all those religions, characters� Jewishness is always mentioned. It felt increasingly othering.
It’s a very male-dominated story and even the main female character is fairly masculine in all but name and pronouns.
The frequent pop culture references are rarely relevant; just an old man name-dropping to sound cool and funny. They may also mean the book won’t age well.
How puerile is our literary knight? Jinn have lots of sex. “Bodiless sex.� Fine. But the tittering way Rushdie repeatedly bangs on about it, mostly with no need, nor detail, is childish - and unerotic.
Image: A jinn of fire and jinnia of smoke: the seductive cover of a Spanish edition.
Treasure?
Important issues peek through the chaos:
� Are faith and reason fundamentally incompatible?
Is that question part of the appeal of fairy tales and magical realism?
How are secular stories different from religious ones?
� "In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate."
That’s an important lesson for the world right now, and always has been. But even as an atheist, I don’t think all hate comes from religion, though it’s certainly effective at stoking the fires.
� Does fear inevitably drive people to religion and/or drink? (I would add war as another common consequence.)
If we can overcome fear, will religion die out?
Is religion inherently, irrevocably less of a force for good than ill?
� What price freedom? What price peace? What price the ability to dream?
Image: "Golconda" by Magritte: are men levitating like Mr Geronimo, falling, or static? (.)
Quotes
There are some nicely polished phrases:
� “His treasure and his curse. To be thin-skinned, far-sighted and loose-tongued.�
� “The garden was the outward expression of inner truth� [the Christian definition of a sacrament], and “the garden could also be a metaphor�, as in Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights�.
� “She has looked a little smudged at the edges, as if she were drawn in soft charcoal. Or smoke.�
� “The mendacious artifice that presented itself as actuality.� No, not magical realism; reality TV.
� “His smile was a thing of menacing, almost feral sweetness.�
� “The fairy world is real� but it does not follow that God exists.�
� “The jinn were uninterested in fiction, and obsessed with realism� Fire burned paper. There were no books in Fairyland.�
� “To recount a fantasy, a story of the imaginary, is also a way of recounting a tale about the actual.�
� “Terrorism was always of particular attraction to male individuals who were either virgins or unable to find a sexual partner� Death, being readily available everywhere, was often an alternative pursuit.�
� “Setting the chessboard in such a fashion that Word War III becomes a one hundred per cent sure thing... The US and Israel we got cranking up to go to war with China and Russia... the apparent cause, that's Syria and Iran... the actual, being the preservation of the value of the petrodollar� Soon we will initiate a false-flag event which will culminate in the abolition of the presidency...the imposition of martial law, and the elimination of all opposition to the coming apocalypse.�
I read that passage the day WW3 was trending on Twitter because Iran's General Suleimani had just been assassinated by the Trump regime.
Better Rushdies
This was 2.5* for me, but I rounded down because it was like a dulled echo, or fan-fic, of the two others I’ve read, both 4*:
� This has a huge cast of characters like Midnight’s Children, which I reviewed HERE, but is more accessible because it’s not so rooted in the country and culture of India. Nevertheless, I’m sure there’s plenty that went over my head.
� This is more sexual (but not sexy) and more violent than the YA Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which I reviewed HERE. Both stress the importance of stories and free speech/thinking, and both namecheck other writers.
As a first draft, this playful adult fairytale of high jinx and low jinn promises much.
As a finished novel, it’s as capricious and shape-shifting as the jinn therein.
Enjoyable at first, but progressively less so.
I was glad when I closed the pages for the last time, with the hopeful finality of stuffing a jinn in a tightly sealed bottle.
�The subject kept changing, and how could anyone live in a crazy situation in which nothing remained the same for five minutes and no narrative was ever driven through to its conclusion, there could be no meaning� only absurdity.�
Image: Cartoon of cat rubbing against jinn’s lamp (.)
Magical Realist Comic Book Fairytale Philosophy
The book explores the inherent contradiction of its magical realism genre: the eternal battle of faith versus fact, especially the 12th century feud about the incoherence of philosophers between rationalist (aka Averroes), and Islamic theologian . Its emphasis on the power of stories to understand our world elevates it beyond the “religion is bad, science is good� binary. The spoonful of sugar to make the philosophy go down includes jinn, giants, transformations, reincarnation, possession, levitation, lightning, jewels, fights, wishes, love, betrayal, and sex.
The main story is mostly in and around contemporary New York, and covers 1001 nights during which the slits between our world and Peristan/Fairyland reopen, and “strangeness� becomes commonplace.
The new strangeness is different from the general types “of American crazy� that include gun crazy, knife crazy, drug crazy, Westbro Baptist Church crazy, and (in 2015!) �Trump crazy�. Now, people become detached from places, beliefs, countries, language, honour, truth, and the ground, and there is separation between author and subject, cause and effect, rich and poor, words and meanings.
At first, the jinn just tinker with reality for their own amusement, but then the dark ones start the War of the World to rid the planet of humans. Dunia, a jinnia princess and mother of dozens of children with Ibn Rushd 800 years earlier, wants to save their descendants, so arouses dormant powers in a handful so they can help.
Image: Ibn Rushd in a detail from The Triumph of Saint Thomas Aquinas by Benozzo Gozzoli. (.)
Ingredients and Indigestion
It’s narrated by our descendants (anonymous plural “we�), 1001 years in the future:
�A history infused with and perhaps overwhelmed by legend�.
There are stories within stories of the numerous characters (human, jinn, and mixed heritage, as well as comic book superheroes), and the stories they tell.
Exposition is unsubtle. Some sections read like entries from a badly written encyclopaedia of mythology:
"... our ancestors, for whom the arrival in the midst of their everyday life of the implacable forces of the metamorphic, the descending avatars of transformation, represented a shocking disruption in the fabric of the real...."
And that’s just part of the sentence!
Muslims, Christians, and Jews feature, and although it’s clear Rushdie dislikes all those religions, characters� Jewishness is always mentioned. It felt increasingly othering.
It’s a very male-dominated story and even the main female character is fairly masculine in all but name and pronouns.
The frequent pop culture references are rarely relevant; just an old man name-dropping to sound cool and funny. They may also mean the book won’t age well.
How puerile is our literary knight? Jinn have lots of sex. “Bodiless sex.� Fine. But the tittering way Rushdie repeatedly bangs on about it, mostly with no need, nor detail, is childish - and unerotic.
Image: A jinn of fire and jinnia of smoke: the seductive cover of a Spanish edition.
Treasure?
Important issues peek through the chaos:
� Are faith and reason fundamentally incompatible?
Is that question part of the appeal of fairy tales and magical realism?
How are secular stories different from religious ones?
� "In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate."
That’s an important lesson for the world right now, and always has been. But even as an atheist, I don’t think all hate comes from religion, though it’s certainly effective at stoking the fires.
� Does fear inevitably drive people to religion and/or drink? (I would add war as another common consequence.)
If we can overcome fear, will religion die out?
Is religion inherently, irrevocably less of a force for good than ill?
� What price freedom? What price peace? What price the ability to dream?
Image: "Golconda" by Magritte: are men levitating like Mr Geronimo, falling, or static? (.)
Quotes
There are some nicely polished phrases:
� “His treasure and his curse. To be thin-skinned, far-sighted and loose-tongued.�
� “The garden was the outward expression of inner truth� [the Christian definition of a sacrament], and “the garden could also be a metaphor�, as in Hieronymus Bosch’s “Garden of Earthly Delights�.
� “She has looked a little smudged at the edges, as if she were drawn in soft charcoal. Or smoke.�
� “The mendacious artifice that presented itself as actuality.� No, not magical realism; reality TV.
� “His smile was a thing of menacing, almost feral sweetness.�
� “The fairy world is real� but it does not follow that God exists.�
� “The jinn were uninterested in fiction, and obsessed with realism� Fire burned paper. There were no books in Fairyland.�
� “To recount a fantasy, a story of the imaginary, is also a way of recounting a tale about the actual.�
� “Terrorism was always of particular attraction to male individuals who were either virgins or unable to find a sexual partner� Death, being readily available everywhere, was often an alternative pursuit.�
� “Setting the chessboard in such a fashion that Word War III becomes a one hundred per cent sure thing... The US and Israel we got cranking up to go to war with China and Russia... the apparent cause, that's Syria and Iran... the actual, being the preservation of the value of the petrodollar� Soon we will initiate a false-flag event which will culminate in the abolition of the presidency...the imposition of martial law, and the elimination of all opposition to the coming apocalypse.�
I read that passage the day WW3 was trending on Twitter because Iran's General Suleimani had just been assassinated by the Trump regime.
Better Rushdies
This was 2.5* for me, but I rounded down because it was like a dulled echo, or fan-fic, of the two others I’ve read, both 4*:
� This has a huge cast of characters like Midnight’s Children, which I reviewed HERE, but is more accessible because it’s not so rooted in the country and culture of India. Nevertheless, I’m sure there’s plenty that went over my head.
� This is more sexual (but not sexy) and more violent than the YA Haroun and the Sea of Stories, which I reviewed HERE. Both stress the importance of stories and free speech/thinking, and both namecheck other writers.
August 12, 2015
Jinn's live in their own world. They are creatures of smokeless fire. They are separated from
our human world.
Jinnia, is a Princess that falls in love and marries a 'human'....
a philosopher named Ibn Rushd......They have many children with human power-
characteristics and Jinn powers, (fly, or slithering descendants - good- bad- and
uninterested in morality).
Jinnia, herself, has a special heart for humans, ...with a wise understanding between the differences that divide both worlds. She reaches out to her children to help create peace,
prosperity, intolerance, and a type of unity and happiness.
Many of the offspring have been distressed that spells have been attacking the jinn.
And in the near future, the 'strangenesses' begin.
Whimsical characters create a fairytale feeling. After a very weird storm, they can create magic.
A Gardner that can levitate, A flamboyant fearless Female jinn, fingertips explode as
lightening bolts, a baby of truth, can see when evil by bestowing boils on
bodies, and a failed graphic artist meets one of his superheroes in one of his own book series.
This story is much shorter than 'Midnight's Children', ....the plot is not quite engaging,
yet it's still a Rushdie- magic carpet ride. I didn't notice 'made-up' Vocabulary words in this novel,.... as there are pages full in Midnight Children.
A fantasy of the possibility of living in two worlds... that the differences between us no longer divide us.
A whimsical quick Rushdie read!
3.7
Thank you to Random House Publishing, Netgalley, and Salman Rushdie, himself...( whom I'll
never under his Genius Mind, yet, it's still enjoyable playing in his sandbox every few years or so). I come away shaking my head a little, and smiling at the same time.
our human world.
Jinnia, is a Princess that falls in love and marries a 'human'....
a philosopher named Ibn Rushd......They have many children with human power-
characteristics and Jinn powers, (fly, or slithering descendants - good- bad- and
uninterested in morality).
Jinnia, herself, has a special heart for humans, ...with a wise understanding between the differences that divide both worlds. She reaches out to her children to help create peace,
prosperity, intolerance, and a type of unity and happiness.
Many of the offspring have been distressed that spells have been attacking the jinn.
And in the near future, the 'strangenesses' begin.
Whimsical characters create a fairytale feeling. After a very weird storm, they can create magic.
A Gardner that can levitate, A flamboyant fearless Female jinn, fingertips explode as
lightening bolts, a baby of truth, can see when evil by bestowing boils on
bodies, and a failed graphic artist meets one of his superheroes in one of his own book series.
This story is much shorter than 'Midnight's Children', ....the plot is not quite engaging,
yet it's still a Rushdie- magic carpet ride. I didn't notice 'made-up' Vocabulary words in this novel,.... as there are pages full in Midnight Children.
A fantasy of the possibility of living in two worlds... that the differences between us no longer divide us.
A whimsical quick Rushdie read!
3.7
Thank you to Random House Publishing, Netgalley, and Salman Rushdie, himself...( whom I'll
never under his Genius Mind, yet, it's still enjoyable playing in his sandbox every few years or so). I come away shaking my head a little, and smiling at the same time.
November 14, 2016
This book is magical in more ways than one, at times reminiscent of Saramago's modern parables or Bulgakov's the Master and Margarita, and very different to any of Rushdie's earlier novels. Having read it in an intense two days, it is probably too soon for me to assess it objectively.
At face value it is not the kind of story I would normally read - an apocalyptic fantasy in which the human world becomes a battlefield for competing jinns. The main reason it works (or at least held my attention) is that Rushdie can master so many literary forms. Humour and playfulness are never far from the surface, and there is much about the history of myths and legends and what they have in common, not to mention a sprinkling of philosophy.
There is also a huge range of allusions both ancient and modern, and many barbed comments about real world issues. The title itself is an allusion to the Thousand and One Nights, and also the length of the "Strangenesses" i.e. the period during which the jinns can cross from their fairyland (Peristan) to the human world. The two sides in the war can be read simply as good and evil, but in Rushdie's world it is the rational female atheists who triumph over the belligerent males and their controlling gods [this is not a spoiler - it is clear from early in the book that the whole thing is told from the perspective of a deep future 1000 years after the main events].
Rushdie clearly relished placing his supernatural beings in a modern context - particularly when describing the jaded seen-it-all-before reactions of New Yorkers to the sudden emergence of miracles and other inexplicable phenomena in their midst, which become comic set pieces.
The book is largely about the power of stories and language, and how myths, legends, ideas and religions adapt to suit human needs, but Rushdie is too much of a romantic not to make his optimistic vision for the future of humanity central.
At face value it is not the kind of story I would normally read - an apocalyptic fantasy in which the human world becomes a battlefield for competing jinns. The main reason it works (or at least held my attention) is that Rushdie can master so many literary forms. Humour and playfulness are never far from the surface, and there is much about the history of myths and legends and what they have in common, not to mention a sprinkling of philosophy.
There is also a huge range of allusions both ancient and modern, and many barbed comments about real world issues. The title itself is an allusion to the Thousand and One Nights, and also the length of the "Strangenesses" i.e. the period during which the jinns can cross from their fairyland (Peristan) to the human world. The two sides in the war can be read simply as good and evil, but in Rushdie's world it is the rational female atheists who triumph over the belligerent males and their controlling gods [this is not a spoiler - it is clear from early in the book that the whole thing is told from the perspective of a deep future 1000 years after the main events].
Rushdie clearly relished placing his supernatural beings in a modern context - particularly when describing the jaded seen-it-all-before reactions of New Yorkers to the sudden emergence of miracles and other inexplicable phenomena in their midst, which become comic set pieces.
The book is largely about the power of stories and language, and how myths, legends, ideas and religions adapt to suit human needs, but Rushdie is too much of a romantic not to make his optimistic vision for the future of humanity central.
April 16, 2016
"In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate."
- Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.
"This is a story from our past, from a time so remote we argue, sometimes, about wither we should call it history or mythology. Some of us call it a fairy tale. But on this we agree: that to tell a story about the past is to tell a story about the present. To recount a fantasy, a story of the imaginary, is also a way of recounting a tale about the actual. If this were not true then the deed would be pointless, and we try in our daily lives to eschew pointlessness whenever possible."
- Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.
Probably 3.5 stars. Don't misunderstand me. I liked the book. I liked its playfulness. The mixture of high and low, of jinn and man, of future telling its past. I loved how it streaks across 1001 days (or nights), a strange myth of the time of strangeness told 1001 years later. How it mixes Harry Potter with Henry James. I loved the cartoon versions of Obama, al-Qæda, etc.
So, yes, it really was a fun read and if these 290 magical realist, baggy, non-linear pages were birthed by some freshman IEL writer just out of some MFA lamp, I would probably call it a great 4-star book, but this is Rushdie dammit. This is the guy who wrote and . You will always be graded by your progeny and against your siblings. Rushdie and his books are no exception. His standard is set and the standard is pretty damn high, so three dark stars for this book, and perhaps one star trapped in some dark blue bottle somewhere.
- Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.
"This is a story from our past, from a time so remote we argue, sometimes, about wither we should call it history or mythology. Some of us call it a fairy tale. But on this we agree: that to tell a story about the past is to tell a story about the present. To recount a fantasy, a story of the imaginary, is also a way of recounting a tale about the actual. If this were not true then the deed would be pointless, and we try in our daily lives to eschew pointlessness whenever possible."
- Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.
Probably 3.5 stars. Don't misunderstand me. I liked the book. I liked its playfulness. The mixture of high and low, of jinn and man, of future telling its past. I loved how it streaks across 1001 days (or nights), a strange myth of the time of strangeness told 1001 years later. How it mixes Harry Potter with Henry James. I loved the cartoon versions of Obama, al-Qæda, etc.
So, yes, it really was a fun read and if these 290 magical realist, baggy, non-linear pages were birthed by some freshman IEL writer just out of some MFA lamp, I would probably call it a great 4-star book, but this is Rushdie dammit. This is the guy who wrote and . You will always be graded by your progeny and against your siblings. Rushdie and his books are no exception. His standard is set and the standard is pretty damn high, so three dark stars for this book, and perhaps one star trapped in some dark blue bottle somewhere.
May 23, 2020
Deliberately fantastical novel, consciously based around the power of storytelling and the mixing of human and spirit worlds in �1001 and 1 Nights�.
The story is actually narrated 1000 years in the future focusing on a period of 1001 days (shortly after the present day) when the jinn world suddenly breaks through into the human world causing chaos.
The book also goes back to the 12th Century and a dispute between two real-life Islamic philosophers: the pious theologian Ghazali of Iran (Renewer of the Faith and Proof of Islam), who placed the power of God above all earthly causes and effects and Ibn Rushd who tried to reconcile reason and humane morality with God and faith. As the book returns to the present day both have been resurrected by Jinn � their initial disputations are interesting with Ghazali taunting Rushd that his modern-day followers are not gentle believers but atheists and pointing out the illogicalities in his attempts to rationalise what is hors-category; slightly disappointingly after this initial balanced argument its clear that Rushdie is completely on his near namesake (and fellow persecuted as an apostate)’s side and very explicitly the Good and Bad Jinn line up appropriately.
The key plot element is that greatest Jinn princess Dunia broke away from Peristan (the land of the Jinn) and took on human form to have a love affair with Rushd which produced huge numbers of children and now descendants all over the world (marked by their lobeless ears and unbeknownst to them a trace of fairy blood). When she returned she sealed up many of the passages between the two worlds but they have started to re-open (possibly due to some form of man-made climate change) and at the same time she starts communing with the ashes of her lover, while the greatest of the evil Jinn Zummurud is summoned by the dead Ghazali to fulfil a vow he made before he was released from a bottle to obey him � and is asked by him to terrorise mankind back to faith.
A global and fantastical battle breaks out on earth between the Good Jinn and Dunia’s descendants one on side and Zummurud and some other leading evil genie’s on the other (who eventually fight each other) � the battle also continues in Peristan with Dunia’s father the King being killed. An overwhelming cast of characters and fantastical events sweep through the overall story � levitating people, a baby whose presence causes corruption to translate into physical corruption no the flesh of the corrupt, a graphic novelist whose creations come to life, a gold digger who can harness lightning to kill.
The last book looks back from the point of view of the narrators who now live in a post religious, rational world but with now a loss of imaginations and dreams.
Really excellent novel � both a sweeping and engrossing story and a thought provoking novel of ideas and allusions.
The story is actually narrated 1000 years in the future focusing on a period of 1001 days (shortly after the present day) when the jinn world suddenly breaks through into the human world causing chaos.
The book also goes back to the 12th Century and a dispute between two real-life Islamic philosophers: the pious theologian Ghazali of Iran (Renewer of the Faith and Proof of Islam), who placed the power of God above all earthly causes and effects and Ibn Rushd who tried to reconcile reason and humane morality with God and faith. As the book returns to the present day both have been resurrected by Jinn � their initial disputations are interesting with Ghazali taunting Rushd that his modern-day followers are not gentle believers but atheists and pointing out the illogicalities in his attempts to rationalise what is hors-category; slightly disappointingly after this initial balanced argument its clear that Rushdie is completely on his near namesake (and fellow persecuted as an apostate)’s side and very explicitly the Good and Bad Jinn line up appropriately.
The key plot element is that greatest Jinn princess Dunia broke away from Peristan (the land of the Jinn) and took on human form to have a love affair with Rushd which produced huge numbers of children and now descendants all over the world (marked by their lobeless ears and unbeknownst to them a trace of fairy blood). When she returned she sealed up many of the passages between the two worlds but they have started to re-open (possibly due to some form of man-made climate change) and at the same time she starts communing with the ashes of her lover, while the greatest of the evil Jinn Zummurud is summoned by the dead Ghazali to fulfil a vow he made before he was released from a bottle to obey him � and is asked by him to terrorise mankind back to faith.
A global and fantastical battle breaks out on earth between the Good Jinn and Dunia’s descendants one on side and Zummurud and some other leading evil genie’s on the other (who eventually fight each other) � the battle also continues in Peristan with Dunia’s father the King being killed. An overwhelming cast of characters and fantastical events sweep through the overall story � levitating people, a baby whose presence causes corruption to translate into physical corruption no the flesh of the corrupt, a graphic novelist whose creations come to life, a gold digger who can harness lightning to kill.
The last book looks back from the point of view of the narrators who now live in a post religious, rational world but with now a loss of imaginations and dreams.
Really excellent novel � both a sweeping and engrossing story and a thought provoking novel of ideas and allusions.
July 29, 2015
Magical Realism? I would have guessed fantasy. This book really crosses the line from magical realism into fantasy. I love fantasy, but some people will care that this book is about imaginary creatures (jinnis) set in an imaginary world (a world with a veil between it and another world where magic and magical creatures can cross through from one to the other) which is the definition of fantasy fiction.
I have read books by Rushdie before and I was floored by the beauty of the language and his use of magical realism. However, this book was different and let me down. You can tell he has the ability to write beautiful language, but he was more interested in writing contrasting phrases, opposing phrases, similar phrases. I felt like I was reading Psalms.
The plot is really two completely different stories intertwined. The reader could enjoy one and not the other or vice versa. One is two men debating religious and philosophical questions about men’s motivations of good and evil. What motivates man to be good? To be evil? Is fear all that will motivate a sinful man to change his life for good? Is religion necessary to do good or is it reason? I felt like I was reading a treatise of some sort.
The other story is about a princess of the jinn, Dunia, who has fallen in love with a mortal man and given him many, many children. He refuses to give them his name and eventually leaves his family. Many years later, a severe storm attacks the city bringing a strangeness with it that continues for 2 years, 8 months, and 28 nights. (This book was inspired by the book 1001 Nights.) Dunia is determined to help her descendants fight the problems of the world. (and get their paternal name for them! Priorities, right?)
This was the most creative and interesting part of the book; however, I never became that invested to any character or to the plot. I could have passed on this Rushdie book. Many people will love it. I think it will be readers who enjoy philosophy, wordplay, many different scenes and don’t mind books that are short but not concise.
I received a copy of this book from NetGalley and the Publisher in exchange for an honest review.
I have read books by Rushdie before and I was floored by the beauty of the language and his use of magical realism. However, this book was different and let me down. You can tell he has the ability to write beautiful language, but he was more interested in writing contrasting phrases, opposing phrases, similar phrases. I felt like I was reading Psalms.
The plot is really two completely different stories intertwined. The reader could enjoy one and not the other or vice versa. One is two men debating religious and philosophical questions about men’s motivations of good and evil. What motivates man to be good? To be evil? Is fear all that will motivate a sinful man to change his life for good? Is religion necessary to do good or is it reason? I felt like I was reading a treatise of some sort.
The other story is about a princess of the jinn, Dunia, who has fallen in love with a mortal man and given him many, many children. He refuses to give them his name and eventually leaves his family. Many years later, a severe storm attacks the city bringing a strangeness with it that continues for 2 years, 8 months, and 28 nights. (This book was inspired by the book 1001 Nights.) Dunia is determined to help her descendants fight the problems of the world. (and get their paternal name for them! Priorities, right?)
This was the most creative and interesting part of the book; however, I never became that invested to any character or to the plot. I could have passed on this Rushdie book. Many people will love it. I think it will be readers who enjoy philosophy, wordplay, many different scenes and don’t mind books that are short but not concise.
I received a copy of this book from NetGalley and the Publisher in exchange for an honest review.
September 23, 2015
A dizzying, imaginative, philosophical mosaic of a novel. Of course, the title is a reference to "1,001 Nights" and, like that work, a major element featured here is stories - the stories that come down to us from history, and the stories that we tell ourselves.
Although the content is quite different, the 'feel' of this book reminded me quite a bit of Umberto Eco's 'Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.'
Narrated from an opaque utopia, 1000 years in the future, we are told of the great war that changed the course of human history, when jinn invaded from Peristan, and the incursion of Faerie into our world caused all sorts of strange occurrences and disasters.
This short story, published in the New Yorker, is an early part of the book:
(Speaking of 'New Yorker,' I also really enjoyed all the insiders' references in the book to life in New York City. Sometimes the little details are what makes something fun.)
It's a good introduction to the book, where we meet the jinnia Dunia, who falls in love with a human philosopher. Much later, in our time period, it is the descendants of their union who may shore up all of humanity's defenses against the capricious malice of the jinn Zummurrud and Zabardast. Prime among these defenders will be a humble gardener known as Mr. Geronimo, and an unsuccessful comic-book artist Jimmy Kapoor - among an eclectic cast of characters. Of course, the immortal Dunia herself will also face off against her nemeses.
The set-up sounds like a standard fantasy plot, but the way it's written is far from standard. It jumps around a lot, shoving ideas into the cracks wherever they might possibly fit. Many of the bits on their own are sparkling, amusing and witty, but at times the book feels like it loses focus. (Of course, 'coherence vs. incoherence' is one of the main themes of the book.) But the central idea? Of course, it's an allegory: "... what was evil and monstrous about the jinn was a mirror of the monstrous and evil part of human beings, that human nature too contained the same irrationality, wanton, willful, malevolent and cruel, and that the battle against the jinn was a portrait of the battle withing the human heart...[which] served to show that world what had to be eradicated within itself, which was unreason itself."
Of course, this being Rushdie, religious extremism, terrorist acts and hatred, are frequently mentioned explicitly. And somehow, it doesn't feel too saccharine when he says, "In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate."
I also love the hopeful prediction: "Fear did not, finally, drive people into the arms of God. Instead, fear was overcome, and with its defeat men and women were able to set God aside."
For most of my way through this, I felt it was a 3-star selection, but the end brought it up to 4 stars for me. It got a lot more philosophical (yes, even more!) suddenly, and I think that some people will find it overly didactic, but it worked for me. I also appreciated at the end, that after working up to making several points, very strongly, there's the admission that even in the so-called perfect world of the future, every utopia must, by necessity, be missing something of value. I know, the idea that our negative qualities as a race may be inextricably tied to our more admirable ones is hardly new, but it's done quite well here.
It's left to the reader to ponder whether the price we might have to pay for "peace, prosperity and tolerance" is one we want to give.
Many thanks to Random House and NetGalley for the opportunity to read. As always, my opinion is solely my own.
Although the content is quite different, the 'feel' of this book reminded me quite a bit of Umberto Eco's 'Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.'
Narrated from an opaque utopia, 1000 years in the future, we are told of the great war that changed the course of human history, when jinn invaded from Peristan, and the incursion of Faerie into our world caused all sorts of strange occurrences and disasters.
This short story, published in the New Yorker, is an early part of the book:
(Speaking of 'New Yorker,' I also really enjoyed all the insiders' references in the book to life in New York City. Sometimes the little details are what makes something fun.)
It's a good introduction to the book, where we meet the jinnia Dunia, who falls in love with a human philosopher. Much later, in our time period, it is the descendants of their union who may shore up all of humanity's defenses against the capricious malice of the jinn Zummurrud and Zabardast. Prime among these defenders will be a humble gardener known as Mr. Geronimo, and an unsuccessful comic-book artist Jimmy Kapoor - among an eclectic cast of characters. Of course, the immortal Dunia herself will also face off against her nemeses.
The set-up sounds like a standard fantasy plot, but the way it's written is far from standard. It jumps around a lot, shoving ideas into the cracks wherever they might possibly fit. Many of the bits on their own are sparkling, amusing and witty, but at times the book feels like it loses focus. (Of course, 'coherence vs. incoherence' is one of the main themes of the book.) But the central idea? Of course, it's an allegory: "... what was evil and monstrous about the jinn was a mirror of the monstrous and evil part of human beings, that human nature too contained the same irrationality, wanton, willful, malevolent and cruel, and that the battle against the jinn was a portrait of the battle withing the human heart...[which] served to show that world what had to be eradicated within itself, which was unreason itself."
Of course, this being Rushdie, religious extremism, terrorist acts and hatred, are frequently mentioned explicitly. And somehow, it doesn't feel too saccharine when he says, "In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate."
I also love the hopeful prediction: "Fear did not, finally, drive people into the arms of God. Instead, fear was overcome, and with its defeat men and women were able to set God aside."
For most of my way through this, I felt it was a 3-star selection, but the end brought it up to 4 stars for me. It got a lot more philosophical (yes, even more!) suddenly, and I think that some people will find it overly didactic, but it worked for me. I also appreciated at the end, that after working up to making several points, very strongly, there's the admission that even in the so-called perfect world of the future, every utopia must, by necessity, be missing something of value. I know, the idea that our negative qualities as a race may be inextricably tied to our more admirable ones is hardly new, but it's done quite well here.
It's left to the reader to ponder whether the price we might have to pay for "peace, prosperity and tolerance" is one we want to give.
Many thanks to Random House and NetGalley for the opportunity to read. As always, my opinion is solely my own.
September 2, 2015
According to Salman Rushdie’s new novel, most of what we know about genies is wrong, which makes me worry that I may have spent too much time watching Barbara Eden. The harem pants, the wish-granting, that eager “master� talk � turns out, it’s all pure fantasy. “It was extremely unwise to believe that such potent, slippery beings could have masters,� Rushdie writes. And we’re not even using the right term. “The name of the immense force that had entered the world was jinn.�
Those fiery, smokeless creatures soar around every page of Sir Salman’s “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights,� and if that title sounds like a chore, make your jinni do the math. You’ll get a thousand and one nights, which is this novel’s fantastical inspiration. In these nested, swirling tales, Rushdie conjures up. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
Those fiery, smokeless creatures soar around every page of Sir Salman’s “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights,� and if that title sounds like a chore, make your jinni do the math. You’ll get a thousand and one nights, which is this novel’s fantastical inspiration. In these nested, swirling tales, Rushdie conjures up. . . .
To read the rest of this review, go to The Washington Post:
February 9, 2017
It's really intimidating to put up the first review on a Rushdie novel....so I'm just going to sit on this for a week or two until I have properly put my words and thoughts together.
I think the main thing we can take away from this is that jinni love sex.
I think the main thing we can take away from this is that jinni love sex.
May 23, 2016
Gotta admit, Salman Rushdie's brand of self-indulgent fanciful fiction will probably never win 'Best of' awards from me (in fact, the only reason I bothered reading this was my recent obsession with his ex-wife, "Top Chef"'s host Padma Lakshmi, to try to {however vicariously} live through him). There was enough here to appreciate his Pynchon-esque intellect, but this modern day update of the timeless "1001 Arabian Nights" fell somewhat flat for me. The whole time I was reading this I was constantly reminded of Neil Gaiman's vastly superior American Gods, substituting the likes of Zeus and Thor et.al. with jins and jinnis . This could have been great, but the quicksand-ed history lesson was at times an unbearable slog. (And a main character named Ibn Rushd? Really, Rushdie?)
September 9, 2018
İki Yıl Sekiz Ay Yirmi Sekiz Gece (yani 1001 gece) tuhaf bir roman. İbn Rüşd ve Gazzali'nin arka planını oluşturduğu cinlerle insanlar arasında geçen bir Dünyalar Savaşı'nı konu ediyor. Uçan insanlar, şimşekler, mezarından dirilenler, sürekli sevişen cinlerle dolu bir kitap bu ve düşünürsek, neredeyse imkânsıza yeltenen bir kitap bu; bu kadar konuyu yapaylaşmadan, böyle konuları çocuklaşmadan anlatmak çok zor. Bence teknik olarak altından kalkabilmiş Salman Rushdie.
Bu konuları 300 sayfada anlatabilmesi bile mucize, ama üstüne bir de onlarca hikâye okuyoruz, ki bunun çok iyi bir fikir olup olmadığı tartışılır. Hikâyeyi kendi başına olduğundansa romanların içinde daha çok seven biri olarak, Orhan Pamuk'un şu minvaldeki sözünü hatırlatmak isterim: "Romanlar, okurunun ayrıntılarını kaldırabileceği uzunlukta olmalıdır." Bu önemli bir düşünce, çünkü eğer bir roman -yazarı 19. yy. gerçekçisi değilse, ayrıntılara boğuldukça, okur metni anlamaktan ziyade anlamsızlığa yuvarlanır. Tabii bir metnin "anlaşılabilecek" bir şey olup olmadığı da tartışmaya açık. Bu kitaptaki onlarca hikâyeden okur, kaçını metnin temeliyle sağlıklı bir biçimde ilişkilendirebilir, bilemiyorum, en azından ben çoğunu yapamadım diyebilirim.
Gelelim kitabın esas meselelerine. Bu kitapta Rushdie'nin bir mesel anlattığını söyleyebiliriz. Sorgusuz sualsiz dindar Gazzali ile tanrının yerine aklı koyan İbn Rüşd arasındaki tartışmayı görüyoruz. Gazzali, ki Neil deGrasse Tyson İslamın bilimde geri kalmasının nedeni olarak onu gösteriyor, imanın her şeyden üstün olduğunu düşünüyor ve kitapta görüldüğü üzere imanı yaratmak için korkuyu kullanıyor. Bu dinlerin en önemli silahıdır. Sanatçının Genç Bir Adam olarak Portresi'nde, dini sorgulayan Dedalus'un, sayfalar süren cehennem tasviri dinlemesi ve dine tekrar bağlanması, salınan dindar korkunun insanlar üstündeki etkisine aklıma gelen en güzel örneklerden. "Kutsal" kitaplarda sükunetten çok hiddetin olması tesadüf değil. İbn Rüşd ise aklın er geç kazanacağına inanıyor. Tanrıya ulaşacaksa da akıl ile ulaşmak istiyor. Bugün, bizim dünyamızın bu iki uç arasında kaldığını söylemek yanlış olmaz. Bir tarafta irrasyonel, korkunun etkisi altındaki şüphe duymayanlar, diğer tarafta ise akla güvenenler. Durum kötü görünse de, netice itibariyle Rushdie bu romanında oldukça iyimser.
Arka planda yakaladığım bir diğer izlek ise, postmodern kurgusallık bahsi. Mavi Yasemin'in anlattığı hikâyeler doğrudan bununla ilgili. Her şeyin kurgusal olduğu, her şeyin hikâyeden yapıldığı fikri ağır basıyor. Bu kurgusallığın dışına çıkmanın mümkün olmadığı da Unyaza hikâyesi ile güzel bir şekilde anlatılıyor. Bunun da romanın içinde önemli bir yeri var, zira uçan insanlar, cinler, büyüler havada uçuşuyor ama yazar bize diyor ki, bunlar o kadar da fantastik şeyler değil, bunlar bir hikâye ama senin hayatın da önünde sonunda bir hikâye yalnızca.
Çin Kutusu hikâyelerinde postmodern sonuçsuzlukla ilgili paragraflar var. Hikâyeleri hikâyelerin kovaladığı, hiçbir hikâyenin sonunun gelmediği, ama hikâyelerin durmadan devam ettiği, anlamın kaybolduğu, kalan tek anlamın anlamsızlık olduğu söyleniyor bölümde, ki postmodernist görüş bu. Varoluşun anlamsızlığı idrak edilmiş, varoluşçuluk aşılmış, geriye oyuncaklarla oynayan çocuklar gibi hikâyelerle oynanan insanların kaldığı bir çağdakileri anlatmak için güzel bir hikâye.
Fakat sorun şu ki, dikkatinizi çektiyse son iki paragraf, onların üstündeki paragrafla çelişiyor. Hem her şeyin kurgusal olduğunu, her şeyin neticede anlamsız olduğunu, hiçbir hikâyenin bitmediğini, bitemediğini, yalnızca yeni hikâyeleri gördüğümüzü söyleyip hem de dinlerin karşısına akılcılığı koyup doğru olan budur demek çelişkili değil mi? Bilemiyorum, bir yerlerde muhtemelen bir şeyleri kaçırdım, bir sonraki okuyuşlara artık...
Roman aynı zamanda azınlıklarla ilgili. Hatta bu roman feminist bir roman diyebiliriz. Eşcinsellerin, ırkçılığa maruz kalanların, kadınların ezilmişliklerini de anlatıyor.
Kitaba dört yıldız veriyorum, çünkü kitabın esas konusunun, diğer küçük hikâyelerdeki metaforların ve analojilerin güzel kurulduğunu düşünüyorum. Eh, itiraf edeyim, aşırı keyifli bir yüzeysel okuma da sunuyor. Ama derinlere dalınca ya ben boğuluyorum ya Rushdie, ki başta da dediğim gibi, kitap olması gerekenden daha fazla yük taşıyor ve anlaşılması zor. Muhtemelen boğulan benimdir yine de.
Bu konuları 300 sayfada anlatabilmesi bile mucize, ama üstüne bir de onlarca hikâye okuyoruz, ki bunun çok iyi bir fikir olup olmadığı tartışılır. Hikâyeyi kendi başına olduğundansa romanların içinde daha çok seven biri olarak, Orhan Pamuk'un şu minvaldeki sözünü hatırlatmak isterim: "Romanlar, okurunun ayrıntılarını kaldırabileceği uzunlukta olmalıdır." Bu önemli bir düşünce, çünkü eğer bir roman -yazarı 19. yy. gerçekçisi değilse, ayrıntılara boğuldukça, okur metni anlamaktan ziyade anlamsızlığa yuvarlanır. Tabii bir metnin "anlaşılabilecek" bir şey olup olmadığı da tartışmaya açık. Bu kitaptaki onlarca hikâyeden okur, kaçını metnin temeliyle sağlıklı bir biçimde ilişkilendirebilir, bilemiyorum, en azından ben çoğunu yapamadım diyebilirim.
Gelelim kitabın esas meselelerine. Bu kitapta Rushdie'nin bir mesel anlattığını söyleyebiliriz. Sorgusuz sualsiz dindar Gazzali ile tanrının yerine aklı koyan İbn Rüşd arasındaki tartışmayı görüyoruz. Gazzali, ki Neil deGrasse Tyson İslamın bilimde geri kalmasının nedeni olarak onu gösteriyor, imanın her şeyden üstün olduğunu düşünüyor ve kitapta görüldüğü üzere imanı yaratmak için korkuyu kullanıyor. Bu dinlerin en önemli silahıdır. Sanatçının Genç Bir Adam olarak Portresi'nde, dini sorgulayan Dedalus'un, sayfalar süren cehennem tasviri dinlemesi ve dine tekrar bağlanması, salınan dindar korkunun insanlar üstündeki etkisine aklıma gelen en güzel örneklerden. "Kutsal" kitaplarda sükunetten çok hiddetin olması tesadüf değil. İbn Rüşd ise aklın er geç kazanacağına inanıyor. Tanrıya ulaşacaksa da akıl ile ulaşmak istiyor. Bugün, bizim dünyamızın bu iki uç arasında kaldığını söylemek yanlış olmaz. Bir tarafta irrasyonel, korkunun etkisi altındaki şüphe duymayanlar, diğer tarafta ise akla güvenenler. Durum kötü görünse de, netice itibariyle Rushdie bu romanında oldukça iyimser.
Arka planda yakaladığım bir diğer izlek ise, postmodern kurgusallık bahsi. Mavi Yasemin'in anlattığı hikâyeler doğrudan bununla ilgili. Her şeyin kurgusal olduğu, her şeyin hikâyeden yapıldığı fikri ağır basıyor. Bu kurgusallığın dışına çıkmanın mümkün olmadığı da Unyaza hikâyesi ile güzel bir şekilde anlatılıyor. Bunun da romanın içinde önemli bir yeri var, zira uçan insanlar, cinler, büyüler havada uçuşuyor ama yazar bize diyor ki, bunlar o kadar da fantastik şeyler değil, bunlar bir hikâye ama senin hayatın da önünde sonunda bir hikâye yalnızca.
Çin Kutusu hikâyelerinde postmodern sonuçsuzlukla ilgili paragraflar var. Hikâyeleri hikâyelerin kovaladığı, hiçbir hikâyenin sonunun gelmediği, ama hikâyelerin durmadan devam ettiği, anlamın kaybolduğu, kalan tek anlamın anlamsızlık olduğu söyleniyor bölümde, ki postmodernist görüş bu. Varoluşun anlamsızlığı idrak edilmiş, varoluşçuluk aşılmış, geriye oyuncaklarla oynayan çocuklar gibi hikâyelerle oynanan insanların kaldığı bir çağdakileri anlatmak için güzel bir hikâye.
Fakat sorun şu ki, dikkatinizi çektiyse son iki paragraf, onların üstündeki paragrafla çelişiyor. Hem her şeyin kurgusal olduğunu, her şeyin neticede anlamsız olduğunu, hiçbir hikâyenin bitmediğini, bitemediğini, yalnızca yeni hikâyeleri gördüğümüzü söyleyip hem de dinlerin karşısına akılcılığı koyup doğru olan budur demek çelişkili değil mi? Bilemiyorum, bir yerlerde muhtemelen bir şeyleri kaçırdım, bir sonraki okuyuşlara artık...
Roman aynı zamanda azınlıklarla ilgili. Hatta bu roman feminist bir roman diyebiliriz. Eşcinsellerin, ırkçılığa maruz kalanların, kadınların ezilmişliklerini de anlatıyor.
Kitaba dört yıldız veriyorum, çünkü kitabın esas konusunun, diğer küçük hikâyelerdeki metaforların ve analojilerin güzel kurulduğunu düşünüyorum. Eh, itiraf edeyim, aşırı keyifli bir yüzeysel okuma da sunuyor. Ama derinlere dalınca ya ben boğuluyorum ya Rushdie, ki başta da dediğim gibi, kitap olması gerekenden daha fazla yük taşıyor ve anlaşılması zor. Muhtemelen boğulan benimdir yine de.
September 14, 2015
*I got an advance copy of this book from the publisher in return of an honest review
Finally done with this book!! I would have completed it way back had I not been super-busy and tired. So, it took me a lot more days than I usually require to finish a books of this size.
Coming back to the book, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is the latest book from the renowned author Salman Rushdie. His book Midnight's Children is the only book that has received more than one Booker Prize. This book won the Booker Prize in 1981. Then, it was awarded the "Booker of Bookers" Prize and the best all-time prize winners in 1993 and 2008 to celebrate the Booker Prize 25th and 40th anniversary. The author has won numerous awards(the list is indeed very long!!) for his contribution to the literary world.
So, you can understand my excitement when I got an advance copy of Rushdie's latest book for review.
After reading this book you would come to the conclusion that whatever you have known about genies is wrong. Our knowledge, at least mine is all based on the TV shows, I Dream of Jeannie and Disney's Aladdin cartoons. In the former you see beautiful Barbara Eden who helps her master Larry Hagman, an astronaut. And in latter we see a very cute and friendly genie who is always there for his master Aladdin. But, I am telling you, after reading this book, all these notions will change. So, be ready to say bye bye to your childhood memories and knowledge of the genies or jinn, if you plan on reading this book.
To begin with, there is no master-slave relationship between the genie and his/her human.....friend? Ally? Whatever you call the human, but he is definitely not the master. Can you believe that? I always thought so; this is what they showed on television right? Also, we have to stop saying genie as its not correct too.
Plot
The story is of a princess of the jinn, who falls in love with a mortal man, a 12th century philosopher. She appears at his doorstep and they start living together. The philosopher is not aware that this beautiful girl is a jinni and he thinks of her as an ordinary homeless girl to whom he gives shelter and names her Duniya. Together they produce an astonishing number of children. The philosopher humorously calls them Duniyazat owing to their large number. One day the philosopher abandons Duniya never to return to her again. Duniya after waiting for a long time goes back to Peristan when the slit between the two worlds(one of the jinn and the other of humans) opens leaving her children behind.
Generations and generations later strange things begin to happen after a storm strikes New York City.
- A gardener who one day wakes to find himself floating above the ground, his feet no longer agreeing to make contact with the earth
- A graphic novelist finds his own creation of Natraj Hero coming to life and coming face to face with him in his bedroom
- A magical baby, who can find corruption by her mere presence appears in the Mayor's office
These people are unaware of the fact that they are descendants of Duniya and part of the so called Duniyazat, the members/siblings of which are scattered here and there and they are unaware of their bonds.
Also, they are soon to find themselves as soldiers in an epic and raging war with the dark jinns, the forces of evil. A war that spans for two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights i.e. thousand and one nights(this is not the only reference of this number in this book, you see it mentioned in many other parts in the book).
What I like
As I really enjoy fantasy books; this gem by Rushdie is a delight to read. I loved the wonderful world of the jinns that he created. Though the world and the dark jinns looked scary and monstrous at times.
Also, Rushdie is an amazing story teller; he has a power to create stories withing stories within stories. His writing is poetic, beautiful and very unique.
The other thing to note is despite all fight and anger of jinns this book is extremely funny.
What I don't like
One of the uniqueness of Rushdie's writing style, that I saw in this book is that he writes really long sentences! There were sentences that were a page long or more separated by comma, semi-colon or nothing at all. And by the time I finished reading any one of these, I was like 'Phew!! Now that was really long!' But, I will not say that I did not like it but it was...different..something I have seen only once before in Anthony Trollope's book. I read The Warden by him and he used really long sentences in it, but Rushdie beats him when it comes to long sentences. This is something I noted and not really disliked, I would say.
Also, there are lots and lots of characters, but that is the requirement of the story-line. Though at times I kept forgetting who was who.
But, these things can be neglected and I did not have any major problems due to these but yes, worth mentioning!
My final thoughts on the book
All in all this book is unconventional, fresh, dazzling and a funny read that you will not be able to put down.
And I am definitely picking up other books from him to explore his writing style more and I look forward to reading more of the magical worlds that he must have created in other books.
Find this and my other book reviews at
Finally done with this book!! I would have completed it way back had I not been super-busy and tired. So, it took me a lot more days than I usually require to finish a books of this size.
Coming back to the book, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is the latest book from the renowned author Salman Rushdie. His book Midnight's Children is the only book that has received more than one Booker Prize. This book won the Booker Prize in 1981. Then, it was awarded the "Booker of Bookers" Prize and the best all-time prize winners in 1993 and 2008 to celebrate the Booker Prize 25th and 40th anniversary. The author has won numerous awards(the list is indeed very long!!) for his contribution to the literary world.
So, you can understand my excitement when I got an advance copy of Rushdie's latest book for review.
After reading this book you would come to the conclusion that whatever you have known about genies is wrong. Our knowledge, at least mine is all based on the TV shows, I Dream of Jeannie and Disney's Aladdin cartoons. In the former you see beautiful Barbara Eden who helps her master Larry Hagman, an astronaut. And in latter we see a very cute and friendly genie who is always there for his master Aladdin. But, I am telling you, after reading this book, all these notions will change. So, be ready to say bye bye to your childhood memories and knowledge of the genies or jinn, if you plan on reading this book.
To begin with, there is no master-slave relationship between the genie and his/her human.....friend? Ally? Whatever you call the human, but he is definitely not the master. Can you believe that? I always thought so; this is what they showed on television right? Also, we have to stop saying genie as its not correct too.
Plot
The story is of a princess of the jinn, who falls in love with a mortal man, a 12th century philosopher. She appears at his doorstep and they start living together. The philosopher is not aware that this beautiful girl is a jinni and he thinks of her as an ordinary homeless girl to whom he gives shelter and names her Duniya. Together they produce an astonishing number of children. The philosopher humorously calls them Duniyazat owing to their large number. One day the philosopher abandons Duniya never to return to her again. Duniya after waiting for a long time goes back to Peristan when the slit between the two worlds(one of the jinn and the other of humans) opens leaving her children behind.
Generations and generations later strange things begin to happen after a storm strikes New York City.
- A gardener who one day wakes to find himself floating above the ground, his feet no longer agreeing to make contact with the earth
- A graphic novelist finds his own creation of Natraj Hero coming to life and coming face to face with him in his bedroom
- A magical baby, who can find corruption by her mere presence appears in the Mayor's office
These people are unaware of the fact that they are descendants of Duniya and part of the so called Duniyazat, the members/siblings of which are scattered here and there and they are unaware of their bonds.
Also, they are soon to find themselves as soldiers in an epic and raging war with the dark jinns, the forces of evil. A war that spans for two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights i.e. thousand and one nights(this is not the only reference of this number in this book, you see it mentioned in many other parts in the book).
What I like
As I really enjoy fantasy books; this gem by Rushdie is a delight to read. I loved the wonderful world of the jinns that he created. Though the world and the dark jinns looked scary and monstrous at times.
Also, Rushdie is an amazing story teller; he has a power to create stories withing stories within stories. His writing is poetic, beautiful and very unique.
The other thing to note is despite all fight and anger of jinns this book is extremely funny.
What I don't like
One of the uniqueness of Rushdie's writing style, that I saw in this book is that he writes really long sentences! There were sentences that were a page long or more separated by comma, semi-colon or nothing at all. And by the time I finished reading any one of these, I was like 'Phew!! Now that was really long!' But, I will not say that I did not like it but it was...different..something I have seen only once before in Anthony Trollope's book. I read The Warden by him and he used really long sentences in it, but Rushdie beats him when it comes to long sentences. This is something I noted and not really disliked, I would say.
Also, there are lots and lots of characters, but that is the requirement of the story-line. Though at times I kept forgetting who was who.
But, these things can be neglected and I did not have any major problems due to these but yes, worth mentioning!
My final thoughts on the book
All in all this book is unconventional, fresh, dazzling and a funny read that you will not be able to put down.
And I am definitely picking up other books from him to explore his writing style more and I look forward to reading more of the magical worlds that he must have created in other books.
Find this and my other book reviews at
April 17, 2020
This is the story of a jinnia, a great princess of the jinn, known as the Lightning Princess on account of her mastery over the thunderbolt, who loved a mortal man long ago, in the twelfth century, as we would say, and of her many descendants, and of her return to the world, after a long absence, to fall in love again, at least for a moment, and then to go to war. It is also the tale of many other jinn, male and female, flying and slithering, good, bad, and uninterested in morality; and of the time of crisis, the time-out-of-joint which we call the time of the strangenesses, which lasted for two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights, which is to say, one thousand nights and one night more. And yes, we have lived another thousand years since those days, but we are all forever changed by that time. Whether for better or for worse, that is for our future to decide.
So there it is, the title of is just another way of writing “One Thousand and One (Arabian) Nights�, and like Scheherazade before him, Sir Salman Rushdie understands what it is to live under a death order; to spin out stories that might prolong or end one's life. And because Rushdie wrote this novel immediately after finishing (a quite bitter recounting of his time in hiding while living under the Ayatollah Khomeini's fatwa), I can't quite fault him for implying here that religion is the root of all evil, but I would have liked this book better if it had been better. For a fantastical account filled with all-powerful genies, feuding-beyond-the-grave philosophers, and an apocalyptic war between two usually unconnected worlds, I found this narrative a bit dull � not to mention repetitive, cartoonish, and pushy. Still: I didn't hate this � I think that Rushdie has a rare gift for words � but this wasn't my favourite Rushdie by a long shot.
This is a story from our past, from a time so remote we argue, sometimes, about whether we should call it history or mythology. Some of us call it a fairy tale. But on this we agree: that to tell a story about the past is to tell a story about the present. To recount a fantasy, a story of the imaginary, is also a way of recounting a tale about the actual. If this were not true then the deed would be pointless, and we try in our daily lives to eschew pointlessness whenever possible.
For some reason, this story is being told a thousand years in our future by an idealised hi-tech race of humans who are living in a post-faith, post-gender, post-racial world. And they begin this story with an incident a thousand years in our own past: In Andalusian Spain, the great rationalist philosopher Ibn Rushd (the secular thinker after whom Salman Rushdie's father changed their own family name) is visited by a beautiful jinnia in the form of a nonpractising (because outlawed) Jew, and because she is so attracted to his mind, this “Dunia� seduces the old man and magically has several dozen of his babies before he walks out on her to resume his public debates about the nature of God with the pious Muslim thinker, Ghazali. A thousand years later, in our own near future, some of the descendants of this union begin to display magical abilities � levitation, love spells, throwing lightning bolts � at the same time that the Earth is experiencing unprecedented storms, and the seams between our own reality and the “fairy world�, Peristan, are opened enough to bring forth god-like destroyers. Cue the War of the Worlds, with Dunia and her descendants fighting against four Grand Ifrits and their minions for the right to occupy Earth. This should have been exciting but the narrative switches too often to Scheherazadean stories-within-stories-without-resolution and then goes up in so much genie smoke.
Our position is that god is a creation of human beings, who only exists because of the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle. If enough people were sensible enough not to clap hands, then this Tinker Bell god would die. However, unfortunately, billions of human beings are still prepared to defend their belief in some sort of god-fairy, and, as a result, god exists. What’s worse is that he is now running amok.
I guess there's some interesting irony in the fact that we have a group of people, a thousand years in our future, telling a story about imaginary beings coming to Earth and ushering in the age of reason; marking this magic-filled time as the moment in which we humans collectively stop believing in God. (Although with our smart phones and videos and social media logged eyewitness accounts, I don't know how in a hi-tech future a thousand years hence the experiences of our present can ever be reduced to “myth�.) But in trying to make his pro-rationalist point, Rushdie needlessly overcomplicates things � just like with this book's clunky title, which is in no way an improvement over the elegantly simple “One Thousand and One Nights", Rushdie kept losing me on this one.
January 19, 2017
There is no other writer like Rushdie out there. He has a perfect combination between the understanding of Oriental and Western philosophy, myth and modern developments. This allows him to web together stories that include Facebook, but also jinni spirits from the olden days. You get the feeling that his worlds are, in fact, so fantastic, that they are too fantastic. But this is what I love about his writing, and I'm sure a lot of people do: he does not get stuck in one single register. He doesn't write in a single style, and his prose is not directed as a single type of reader. His versatility and uncanny narrating abilities qualify him to be one of the most revered authors of our time, and every time I finish one of his books, I can't help but fall in love all over again.
October 29, 2015
It’s no secret that the line between genre fiction and literary fiction has become blurry in recent years. The tropes of fantasy and science fiction have been embraced by many writers operating outside the confines implied by genre, leading to a richer and more meaningful experience on both signs of that increasingly-hard-to-see line.
Salman Rushdie has never been afraid to incorporate genre conventions into his own work. The author’s latest is “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Days�, a fantasist fable whose unwieldy title becomes apt when one does the math. That length of time translates to 1,001 days; that connection to the Arabian Nights tales is central to Rushdie’s narrative.
It’s a tale of a near future, one not long after our present, in which the dimensional barriers between the realm of the jinn and our own have been breached. The jinn � the genies and fairies and demons of so many of our myths and legends � are deeply powerful beings driven by sensuality and mischief.
While most jinn viewed humanity as a source of amusement at most, there was one � named Dunia � who fell in love with a human, a 12th century philosopher named Ibn Rushd. That love led to a multitude of children, children who were forever marked by their supernatural heritage � though most never knew it.
But when the gates between worlds come open again following a tremendous storm, Dunia’s descendants are changed. Their heritage leads them to manifest what become known as “strangenesses� � a gardener discovers that he is floating a fraction of an inch above the ground, a scorned mistress casts lightning from her fingertips, an abandoned baby causes blemishes on the skin of the corrupt � and the world is thrown into chaos. Said chaos is only exacerbated when the most powerful of the jinn seek to exact revenge upon the mortal realm for slights both real and perceived.
It is left to Dunia � whose love for mankind has never left her � to bring forth the full extent of her human descendants in an effort to combat the bloodthirsty rage and amorality of the jinn princes who have chosen to exert their will on the world of man.
The narrative is framed as a piece of anthropological research, an attempt by people from a thousand years in the future to piece together the truth about the historical event that changed the course of humanity � an event they know as “the War of the Worlds� � despite much of their information having faded into assorted shades that drift somewhere between fact and myth.
One thing that everyone knows for sure � the time of the strangenesses lasted exactly two years, eight months and 28 days.
Rushdie gives us a lot to unpack in “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Days.� His use of a far-future framing device lends an extra layer of the surreal to a story that is already awash in weirdness. That distance also allows for a number of tossed-off and wildly disparate allusions. The references come fast and furious. There’s plenty about the philosophies of Ibn Rushd and the ideas and stories of his 12th century contemporaries. There are also more modern cultural touchstones, with nods to reality television and Henry James and Mickey Mouse and so on. It’s a conceptual grab bag that makes for some really entertaining reading.
(It should also be noted that this book is very funny. Extremely funny, in fact.)
But of course, clever references and polished prose � both of which are abundant here � can only go so far. In the end, the story needs to resonate. And in his illustration of the conflicts between man and jinn, Rushdie strikes hard at some of the conflicts between man and man. He explores the nature of religious turmoil, with particular disdain aimed at extremists and fanaticism. Social power imbalances are addressed, as are issues at the top end of the economic ladder.
It’s all here, sheathed in a wonderfully readable armor of satiric savvy and pop-culture cleverness. What Rushdie has done is take our world’s real issues and create a modern day fable, filled with the mystical mystery of the stories of centuries past while still maintaining a connection to the ideas and issues of the present.
“Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Days� is an idiosyncratic and innovative work, brilliantly funny and emotionally engaging. Many readers count Rushdie among our greatest writers; books like this one are the reason why.
June 28, 2015
how were such things to be understood? it was easier to believe that Chance, always the hidden principle of the universe, was joining forces with allegory, symbolism, surrealism and chaos, and taking charge of human affairs, than it was to accept the truth, namely the growing interference of the jinn in the daily life of the world.like an apologal avengers/peter pan mash-up with scheherazade as the origin story, salman rushdie's latest novel, two years eight months and twenty-eight nights is heavy on both mythology and cinematic action. spanning a thousand years of narrative (but told from another thousand years hence), the hybrid good v. evil/love story is often great fun, populated as it is with otherworldly characters and a civilization on the brink. rushdie, in homage to the arabian nights (check the title), employs a rich tapestry of allusions to both literature of yore and current pop culture.
although rushdie takes aim at religion and its requisite blind faith, he does so with humor and comic bookish conflict, sending up a pernicious force with playfulness, wit, and a continuous nod to the rich tradition of worldly fairy tales. two years eight months and twenty-eight nights, satirical, allegorical, referential, is, above all, a well-crafted tale that all but begs for a screen adaptation. rushdie's new novel is a fine outing, offering both engagement and entertainment, with a light, deft recrimination of humanity's ongoing (and folly-ful) devotion to outdated deities and doctrines.
we were all trapped in stories, she said, just as he had, his wavy hair, his naughty smile, his beautiful mind, each of us the prisoner of our own solipsistic narrative, each family the captive of the family story, each community locked within its own tale of itself, each people the victims of their own versions of history, and there were parts of the world where narratives collided and went to war, where there were two or more incompatible stories fighting for space on, to speak, the same page.
September 9, 2017
Rushdie's novel is a headache-inducing regurgitation of his major themes, which were fresh in the late-1980s, but are now out of date. Metamorphoses abound, as does the blurring of fact and fiction. The worlds of fact and fiction blend, the wall that separates pop culture and high culture disintegrates. The dark world of faith-based fascistic religion battles the light of open-mindedness, art, storytelling.
Characters emerge with the frequency of a Dickens' novel, but they neither posses agency nor interiority. They function as parents of the above-mentioned themes - which makes the book very self-aware in its didacticism. The reader can tell which side Rushdie is on in his, ironically enough, black-and-white universe. If you've read enough Rushdie, you should know from my first paragraph which side Rushdie is on...
The book also is annoyingly loaded with hammy pop culture references. In fact, these references sometimes become the very stuff of Rushdie's sentences. See the way in which a reference to Wim Wenders' (or U2's) "Faraway (So Close!)" is the meat of one sentence. And then take this sentence and multiply it by a hundred and you get what Rushdie is up to. This isn't a style; it's laziness. No matter Rushdie's intent, he simply doesn't have Joyce's gift for this sort of thing.
The sentences that don't contain pop cultural or mythic sentences are poorly written. So much so that they meanderingly and poorly serve Rushdie's rhetoric. The book, in other words, is overcooked. There's too much seasoning for so little meat. And said meat, over which I went in paragraph one, is of the been-there-done-that variety.
It's time for Rushdie to show some development as a thinker. The Moor's Last Sigh was his last great book that showed artistic and philosophical development - and that book came out in the mid-1990s.
What TYEMATEN shows is that Rushdie's work has devolved to the point where it almost parodies Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor's Last Sigh. Indeed, it leaves me wondering whether these books are that great in the first place.
Perhaps Rushdie was always just a weak shadow of his major influences: Joyce, Grass, García Márquez, Dickens...
TYEMATEN adds a little Saramago to the mix, but so what?
The architecture of the book is obvious, the prose is overwrought, the pop culture and other allusions feel forced. Yikes!
Characters emerge with the frequency of a Dickens' novel, but they neither posses agency nor interiority. They function as parents of the above-mentioned themes - which makes the book very self-aware in its didacticism. The reader can tell which side Rushdie is on in his, ironically enough, black-and-white universe. If you've read enough Rushdie, you should know from my first paragraph which side Rushdie is on...
The book also is annoyingly loaded with hammy pop culture references. In fact, these references sometimes become the very stuff of Rushdie's sentences. See the way in which a reference to Wim Wenders' (or U2's) "Faraway (So Close!)" is the meat of one sentence. And then take this sentence and multiply it by a hundred and you get what Rushdie is up to. This isn't a style; it's laziness. No matter Rushdie's intent, he simply doesn't have Joyce's gift for this sort of thing.
The sentences that don't contain pop cultural or mythic sentences are poorly written. So much so that they meanderingly and poorly serve Rushdie's rhetoric. The book, in other words, is overcooked. There's too much seasoning for so little meat. And said meat, over which I went in paragraph one, is of the been-there-done-that variety.
It's time for Rushdie to show some development as a thinker. The Moor's Last Sigh was his last great book that showed artistic and philosophical development - and that book came out in the mid-1990s.
What TYEMATEN shows is that Rushdie's work has devolved to the point where it almost parodies Midnight's Children, The Satanic Verses, and The Moor's Last Sigh. Indeed, it leaves me wondering whether these books are that great in the first place.
Perhaps Rushdie was always just a weak shadow of his major influences: Joyce, Grass, García Márquez, Dickens...
TYEMATEN adds a little Saramago to the mix, but so what?
The architecture of the book is obvious, the prose is overwrought, the pop culture and other allusions feel forced. Yikes!
June 5, 2022
Прекрасна казкова історія з елементами міфології, філософії, різноманітних алюзій та сюру.
Місцями мова і стиль автора нагадували Террі Пратчетта.
Чудовий гумор, а точніше висміювання автором декого і дечого, безліч цікавих посилань на відомі твори. Ну і плюс те, що це просто енциклопедія по світу джинів😂
І не покидала думка, що книгу 100% у майбутньому захочу перечитати 😊
На мій погляд, це було чудове перше знайомство з автором.
Місцями мова і стиль автора нагадували Террі Пратчетта.
Чудовий гумор, а точніше висміювання автором декого і дечого, безліч цікавих посилань на відомі твори. Ну і плюс те, що це просто енциклопедія по світу джинів😂
І не покидала думка, що книгу 100% у майбутньому захочу перечитати 😊
На мій погляд, це було чудове перше знайомство з автором.
June 21, 2016
This is my first Salman Rushdie novel. I only listened to approximately 25% of the audiobook, before I realized I wasn't interested or invested in the characters or what was happening. It's quite dry and I was struggling to focus on it, which usually isn't a problem for me when it comes to audiobooks. Maybe someday I will try again in print.
August 30, 2015
Rich, thoughtful, fantastical, beautifully and masterfully written. A fable of a war between the earth and Fairyland, between humans and jinni, that is also a meditation on philosophy, religion, love, fear. Wonderful. Loved it.
December 11, 2015
There was a literal flood of Russian publications in India during the 1980’s and 90’s. While this was a reflection of India’s leftist leanings, it later came to light that there was a ploy by Russian intelligence to sway young minds very early into the socialist/communist mind-set. Be that as it may, they were a big part of growing up in the 80’s and amidst the shining pages of a children’s book I had come across the picture of a matryoshka doll which still remains as a faded image within my mind. The fact that a number of dolls could be fitted one within the other with no external indication as to the contents was a surprise to me as a kid. After having been acquainted to various myths from across the world, understanding dawned that we humans have been employing this tactic for ages now in storytelling. The method that Salman Rushdie uses for this novel put me in the mind to remember the doll and how in the hand of the right craftsman, it can be really a thing of beauty. Wrapped between the layers of a large number of seemingly unconnected stories, Rushdie comes up with a timely social satire.
The main characters in this story are the Jinn (supernatural beings of immense power from the Arabic myths) who split between the factions of good and evil battle for supremacy over the Earth. How the conflict begins, escalates and finally concludes is the three-part act of this tale. The difference lies in how Rushdie executes the whole story. Unlike a typical fantasy tale, he shies away from the violence and focuses more on the human side of the conflict. Pause to think of it and we realize that all these gods, demons and angels are nothing but our own reflections. For an act of intense evil or dazzling goodness, one need not look up to the skies for a winged creature to come out and help/hamper them in the process. It is all within us and we choose with our fickle natures, the guise we want to put on while faced with situations. All of Rushdie’s Jinn are examples of having driven the humans to acts of good and evil while having world domination delivered right into their hands.
Rushdie cleverly inserts a lot of commentary on the present state of affairs in the world to the novel : the fear of the so called ‘intellectuals� about the rise of Hindu intolerance (read - fear of RSS), how the Taliban suppressed art and women in Afghanistan, America’s urge to bring freedom to countries which they have an eye on, our overindulgence and addiction to gadgets and many an incident that defines the world of today. Needless to say, Rushdie shares his own opinions on these through the mouths and minds of his characters. As a writer of fairytales, Rushdie had awed me with Haroun and the sea of stories and Luka and the fire of life earlier. Cut a few scenes of violence, swearing and sex and this tale could fall right into that category.
An interesting story, if not a tad too long. Recommended.
The main characters in this story are the Jinn (supernatural beings of immense power from the Arabic myths) who split between the factions of good and evil battle for supremacy over the Earth. How the conflict begins, escalates and finally concludes is the three-part act of this tale. The difference lies in how Rushdie executes the whole story. Unlike a typical fantasy tale, he shies away from the violence and focuses more on the human side of the conflict. Pause to think of it and we realize that all these gods, demons and angels are nothing but our own reflections. For an act of intense evil or dazzling goodness, one need not look up to the skies for a winged creature to come out and help/hamper them in the process. It is all within us and we choose with our fickle natures, the guise we want to put on while faced with situations. All of Rushdie’s Jinn are examples of having driven the humans to acts of good and evil while having world domination delivered right into their hands.
Rushdie cleverly inserts a lot of commentary on the present state of affairs in the world to the novel : the fear of the so called ‘intellectuals� about the rise of Hindu intolerance (read - fear of RSS), how the Taliban suppressed art and women in Afghanistan, America’s urge to bring freedom to countries which they have an eye on, our overindulgence and addiction to gadgets and many an incident that defines the world of today. Needless to say, Rushdie shares his own opinions on these through the mouths and minds of his characters. As a writer of fairytales, Rushdie had awed me with Haroun and the sea of stories and Luka and the fire of life earlier. Cut a few scenes of violence, swearing and sex and this tale could fall right into that category.
An interesting story, if not a tad too long. Recommended.
December 16, 2016
When Micheal Jackson was dead on June 25, 2009. I closed my room, locked the internal sockets and wept because with for his death, a dream was closed. A dream to meet him, to tell him, to let him know that he was the first person who injected inside me the first germ of any form of art.
And now the second dream is lying ahead, shaping its face from hideouts into the locales of clouds - a dream to meet Sir Salman Rushdie and JM Coetzee.
If Sir Coetzee is my torchlight in finding the path to wisdom. Then Sir Rushdie is my key to receive knowledge. One is heart and other is brain.
Well coming onto the book, I would say this is the again same old story of fight between good and bad, dark and light, right and wrong, angel and demon ... and this time it weaved into the narratives reserved for Djinn and their magical world and some beautiful insights that how they control human brains to generate different reactions of hate, anger blah blah ... Jinni Duniazat fighting for humanity against the creations of her own race, Jinn Zhumurund and his team. And how human beings who are descents from the this fairy princess of Peristan, Duniazat, and they helped her to save the world and avenge her father's killer ... Nothing much was there in the story.
I don't read Sir Rushdie's book to find a story but I read it for beauty of the written prose. Some sentences are like, it never cease the joy of reading them... He is a ocean and it was very minute drop.
The story more or less goes on the same pattern, though this time it was a little faded comparatively as it went in The Satanic verses or 'Haroun and the Sea of stories'
And now the second dream is lying ahead, shaping its face from hideouts into the locales of clouds - a dream to meet Sir Salman Rushdie and JM Coetzee.
If Sir Coetzee is my torchlight in finding the path to wisdom. Then Sir Rushdie is my key to receive knowledge. One is heart and other is brain.
Well coming onto the book, I would say this is the again same old story of fight between good and bad, dark and light, right and wrong, angel and demon ... and this time it weaved into the narratives reserved for Djinn and their magical world and some beautiful insights that how they control human brains to generate different reactions of hate, anger blah blah ... Jinni Duniazat fighting for humanity against the creations of her own race, Jinn Zhumurund and his team. And how human beings who are descents from the this fairy princess of Peristan, Duniazat, and they helped her to save the world and avenge her father's killer ... Nothing much was there in the story.
I don't read Sir Rushdie's book to find a story but I read it for beauty of the written prose. Some sentences are like, it never cease the joy of reading them... He is a ocean and it was very minute drop.
The story more or less goes on the same pattern, though this time it was a little faded comparatively as it went in The Satanic verses or 'Haroun and the Sea of stories'
December 29, 2015
this book is one of those where you either love it or hate it, as rushdie in his latest book has turned to a story about good and evil through magical and supernatural and also the book feels a different telling of the arabian nights and the eastern stories we learnt as children but more adult version.
September 6, 2016
Salman Rushdie is hip. Somehow I always felt his books would be boring. Although I sympathized with the guy, and I admired his fighting spirit, I never read one of his books. He seemed sort of s Saint of literature. Well I was wrong again. This book is lively, often funny and beautifully written, its deep wisdom is woven into the story with expert grace.
Rushdie does not shy away from the fact that everyone knows his history and instead uses that to create another level on which this great novel can be understood.
Rushdie does not shy away from the fact that everyone knows his history and instead uses that to create another level on which this great novel can be understood.
April 22, 2024
Hab mich im Rahmen mehrerer Versuche nur ca. bis zur Hälfte durchgekämpft, war mir insgesamt einfach zu zäh, zu wirr und unverständlich, vielleicht habe ich irgendwann zu viel Zeit und versuche es nochmal von vorne. Aber tatsächlich gebe ich trotzdem die Bewertung ab, weil ich mir nach so viel Zeit mit dem Buch schon eine grundsätzliche Einschätzung zutraue.
August 13, 2016
"This is what stories are, experience retold by many tongues to which, sometimes, we give a single name, Homer, Valmiki, Vyasa, Scheherazade. We, for our own part, simply call ourselves 'we'. 'We' are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is. As they pass down to us the stories lift themselves away from time and place, losing the specificity of their beginnings, but gaining the purity of essences, of being simply themselves. And by extension, or by the same token, as we like to say, though we do not know what the token is or was, these stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become, or can perhaps be."
Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty Eight Nights is very much vintage Salman Rushdie, even down to the slightly puerile title, which, of course, equates to 1001 nights (the pedant within me insists on adding: assuming the year is not a leap year and the months are January to August), and including his signature invented names for characters of which he can then make dreadful puns ("Ronnimus-the-pastor's-sonnimus").
But trademark mannerisms aside, Rushdie is one of our finest writers, and the novel also showcases his wonderfully fertile imagination and his exuberant and yet erudite prose. For example one, relatively minor, character is introduced as:
"Bento, a dandy with rakishly floppy brown hair and a colourful relationship with cravats, came across as absurdly glamorous and almost shockingly charming, the scion of a big Hollywood dynasty. He was flamboyantly intellectual, with a tendency to quote Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class with a bitter irony leavened somewhat by his own, indefatigable Hollywood grin, a Joe E. Brown dazzler full of big, bright, white teeth, inherited from a mother who had been on the screen with Chaplin.
Bento was proud to bear one version of the first name of the philosopher Spinoza. 'In a translation of myself,' he liked to say, 'I would be Baruch Ivory. Maybe if I'd stayed in the motion picture business that would have been a better handle. Be that as it may. Here, in New Amsterdam, I'm proud to be named after Benedito de Espinosa, Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam the Older. From him I take my famous rationalism, also my knowledge that mind and body are one and Descartes was wrong to separate them."
The reference to rationalism in his quote is important. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights tells the story of a "War of the worlds"set in the near future but narrated from 1000 years hence. The protagonists are jinns, or genies - but these are not the cuddly genies of popular myth:
"They had so much to learn. They had to stop saying genie and associating the word with pantomime, or with Barbara Eden in pink harem pants on TV, blonde 'Jeannie' in love with Larry Hagman, an astronaut who became her 'master'. It was extremely unwise to believe that such potent, slippery beings could have masters. The name of the immense force that had entered the world was jinn."
The jinn cause chaos in the world, with supernatural phenomena occuring. Note the cleverly inserted literary and artistic references in the below (Ionesco, Magritte, Gogol, etc):
"In a Romanian village a woman started laying eggs. In a French town the citizenry began turning into rhinoceros. Old Irish people took to living in rubbish bins. A Belgian man looked into a mirror and saw the back of his head reflected in it. A Russian official lost his nose and then saw it walking around St Petersburg by itself. A narrow cloud sliced across a full moon and a Spanish lady gazing up at it felt a sharp pain as a razor blade cut her eyeball in half and the vitreous humour, the gelatinous matter filling the space between the lens and the retina, flowed out. Ants crawled out of a hole in a man's palm."
The war is also a proxy battle between two (non-fictional) 11th and 12th Century philosophers and theologians, Al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd (also known as Averroes in the West).
To quote Wikipedia, Al-Ghazali believed that any individual act of a natural phenomenon occurred only because God willed it to happen, Ibn Rushd insisted phenomena followed natural laws that God created. Historically, Al-Ghazali were to have more resonance in Islam, whereas Ibn Rushd, although a Muslim believer, has more influence on Western secularism.
In the novel Zummurud, the leader of the dark jinn, was once set-free by Al-Ghazali and hence indebted to him, and Dunia, the Jinn Princess, took human form and was the lover of Ibn Rushd, with the war with the Jinn largely fought using an army of their descendents.
Having established an interesting and balanced dialogue initially between al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd, the former for example pointing out that the true descendants of the latter are non-believers, Rushdie ultimately comes down firmly on Ibn Rushd's side, perhaps not surprisingly give that Rushdie's own family name was adopted by his father in honour of Ibn Rushd.
The battle takes on many contemporary references ("crazed paramilitary jinn parasites in charge of tanks in Eastern Europe, shooting passenger aircraft out of the sky"), particularly to the Taliban / ISIS, with the the Dark Jinn allying themselves with a Foundation of Swots:
"what the swots had studied deeply was the art of forbidding things, and in a very short time they had forbidden painting, sculpture, music, theatre, film, journalism, hashish, voting, elections, individualism, disagreement, pleasure, happiness, pool tables, clean-shaves chins (on men), women's faces, women's bodies, women's education, women's rights. They would have liked to have forbidden women altogether but even they could see that this was not entirely feasible, so they contented themselves with making women's lives as unpleasant as possible."
Zummurud takes great joy in taking this further.
"Zummurud's alliance with the vicious and illiterate Swots of A. gave him what passed for a programme of governance, and he set about enthusiastically proscribing things just the way they did, poetry, bicycles, toilet paper, fireworks, love stories, political parties, French fries, eyeglasses, root-canal dentistry, encyclopedias, condoms and chocolate, and burning anyone who raised an objection at the stake, or chopping them in half, or, as he gained enthusiasm for the work, hanging, drawing and quartering."
Ultimately the battle as Rushdie's narrator sees it is about the defeat irrationality ("The irrational in man as well as jinn had to be defeated, so that an age of reason could begin.") and the end result is the removal of faith:
"It seems to us self-evident, however, that the use of religion as a justification for repression, horror, tyranny, and even barbarism, a phenomenon which undoubtedly predated the War of the Worlds but was certainly a significant aspect of that conflict, led in the end to the terminal disillusion of the human race with the idea of faith. It has now been so long since anyone was gulled by the fantasies of those antique, defunct belief systems that the point may seem academic."
Although the post-religion, rationale world that the narrator inhabits, 1000 years later, is not without it's issue. In particular, no one dreams anymore:
"Mostly we are glad. Our lives are good. But sometimes we wish for the dreams to return. Sometimes, for we have not wholly rid ourselves of perversity, we long for nightmares."
Overall a beautifully written and highly enjoyable novel, a wonderful story about the power of stories, and with some thought provoking philosophical ideas.
The negative side is that Rushdie's greatest strength, his prodigious imagination, can also be a weakness and at times the fantastical story gets a little out of control with no real sense of plot other than the rather heavily telegraphed conclusion.
It would be tempting to hail this as a return to form, except that, his self-indulgent autobiography aside, Rushdie has been back on form ever since Shalimar the Clown. That, and the Enchantress of Florence were both excellent, and underappreciated, novels.
Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty Eight Nights is very much vintage Salman Rushdie, even down to the slightly puerile title, which, of course, equates to 1001 nights (the pedant within me insists on adding: assuming the year is not a leap year and the months are January to August), and including his signature invented names for characters of which he can then make dreadful puns ("Ronnimus-the-pastor's-sonnimus").
But trademark mannerisms aside, Rushdie is one of our finest writers, and the novel also showcases his wonderfully fertile imagination and his exuberant and yet erudite prose. For example one, relatively minor, character is introduced as:
"Bento, a dandy with rakishly floppy brown hair and a colourful relationship with cravats, came across as absurdly glamorous and almost shockingly charming, the scion of a big Hollywood dynasty. He was flamboyantly intellectual, with a tendency to quote Thorstein Veblen's Theory of the Leisure Class with a bitter irony leavened somewhat by his own, indefatigable Hollywood grin, a Joe E. Brown dazzler full of big, bright, white teeth, inherited from a mother who had been on the screen with Chaplin.
Bento was proud to bear one version of the first name of the philosopher Spinoza. 'In a translation of myself,' he liked to say, 'I would be Baruch Ivory. Maybe if I'd stayed in the motion picture business that would have been a better handle. Be that as it may. Here, in New Amsterdam, I'm proud to be named after Benedito de Espinosa, Portuguese Jew of Amsterdam the Older. From him I take my famous rationalism, also my knowledge that mind and body are one and Descartes was wrong to separate them."
The reference to rationalism in his quote is important. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights tells the story of a "War of the worlds"set in the near future but narrated from 1000 years hence. The protagonists are jinns, or genies - but these are not the cuddly genies of popular myth:
"They had so much to learn. They had to stop saying genie and associating the word with pantomime, or with Barbara Eden in pink harem pants on TV, blonde 'Jeannie' in love with Larry Hagman, an astronaut who became her 'master'. It was extremely unwise to believe that such potent, slippery beings could have masters. The name of the immense force that had entered the world was jinn."
The jinn cause chaos in the world, with supernatural phenomena occuring. Note the cleverly inserted literary and artistic references in the below (Ionesco, Magritte, Gogol, etc):
"In a Romanian village a woman started laying eggs. In a French town the citizenry began turning into rhinoceros. Old Irish people took to living in rubbish bins. A Belgian man looked into a mirror and saw the back of his head reflected in it. A Russian official lost his nose and then saw it walking around St Petersburg by itself. A narrow cloud sliced across a full moon and a Spanish lady gazing up at it felt a sharp pain as a razor blade cut her eyeball in half and the vitreous humour, the gelatinous matter filling the space between the lens and the retina, flowed out. Ants crawled out of a hole in a man's palm."
The war is also a proxy battle between two (non-fictional) 11th and 12th Century philosophers and theologians, Al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd (also known as Averroes in the West).
To quote Wikipedia, Al-Ghazali believed that any individual act of a natural phenomenon occurred only because God willed it to happen, Ibn Rushd insisted phenomena followed natural laws that God created. Historically, Al-Ghazali were to have more resonance in Islam, whereas Ibn Rushd, although a Muslim believer, has more influence on Western secularism.
In the novel Zummurud, the leader of the dark jinn, was once set-free by Al-Ghazali and hence indebted to him, and Dunia, the Jinn Princess, took human form and was the lover of Ibn Rushd, with the war with the Jinn largely fought using an army of their descendents.
Having established an interesting and balanced dialogue initially between al-Ghazali and Ibn Rushd, the former for example pointing out that the true descendants of the latter are non-believers, Rushdie ultimately comes down firmly on Ibn Rushd's side, perhaps not surprisingly give that Rushdie's own family name was adopted by his father in honour of Ibn Rushd.
The battle takes on many contemporary references ("crazed paramilitary jinn parasites in charge of tanks in Eastern Europe, shooting passenger aircraft out of the sky"), particularly to the Taliban / ISIS, with the the Dark Jinn allying themselves with a Foundation of Swots:
"what the swots had studied deeply was the art of forbidding things, and in a very short time they had forbidden painting, sculpture, music, theatre, film, journalism, hashish, voting, elections, individualism, disagreement, pleasure, happiness, pool tables, clean-shaves chins (on men), women's faces, women's bodies, women's education, women's rights. They would have liked to have forbidden women altogether but even they could see that this was not entirely feasible, so they contented themselves with making women's lives as unpleasant as possible."
Zummurud takes great joy in taking this further.
"Zummurud's alliance with the vicious and illiterate Swots of A. gave him what passed for a programme of governance, and he set about enthusiastically proscribing things just the way they did, poetry, bicycles, toilet paper, fireworks, love stories, political parties, French fries, eyeglasses, root-canal dentistry, encyclopedias, condoms and chocolate, and burning anyone who raised an objection at the stake, or chopping them in half, or, as he gained enthusiasm for the work, hanging, drawing and quartering."
Ultimately the battle as Rushdie's narrator sees it is about the defeat irrationality ("The irrational in man as well as jinn had to be defeated, so that an age of reason could begin.") and the end result is the removal of faith:
"It seems to us self-evident, however, that the use of religion as a justification for repression, horror, tyranny, and even barbarism, a phenomenon which undoubtedly predated the War of the Worlds but was certainly a significant aspect of that conflict, led in the end to the terminal disillusion of the human race with the idea of faith. It has now been so long since anyone was gulled by the fantasies of those antique, defunct belief systems that the point may seem academic."
Although the post-religion, rationale world that the narrator inhabits, 1000 years later, is not without it's issue. In particular, no one dreams anymore:
"Mostly we are glad. Our lives are good. But sometimes we wish for the dreams to return. Sometimes, for we have not wholly rid ourselves of perversity, we long for nightmares."
Overall a beautifully written and highly enjoyable novel, a wonderful story about the power of stories, and with some thought provoking philosophical ideas.
The negative side is that Rushdie's greatest strength, his prodigious imagination, can also be a weakness and at times the fantastical story gets a little out of control with no real sense of plot other than the rather heavily telegraphed conclusion.
It would be tempting to hail this as a return to form, except that, his self-indulgent autobiography aside, Rushdie has been back on form ever since Shalimar the Clown. That, and the Enchantress of Florence were both excellent, and underappreciated, novels.
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