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    Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: A Novel
    Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: A Novel
    Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: A Novel
    Audiobook11 hours

    Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: A Novel

    Written by Salman Rushdie

    Narrated by Robert G. Slade

    3.5/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The Washington Post • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Harper’s Bazaar • St. Louis Post-Dispatch • The Guardian • The Kansas City Star • National Post • BookPage • Kirkus Reviews

    From Salman Rushdie, one of the great writers of our time, comes a spellbinding work of fiction that blends history, mythology, and a timeless love story. A lush, richly layered novel in which our world has been plunged into an age of unreason, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is a breathtaking achievement and an enduring testament to the power of storytelling.

    In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the strangenesses begin. A down-to-earth gardener finds that his feet no longer touch the ground. A graphic novelist awakens in his bedroom to a mysterious entity that resembles his own sub–Stan Lee creation. Abandoned at the mayor’s office, a baby identifies corruption with her mere presence, marking the guilty with blemishes and boils. A seductive gold digger is soon tapped to combat forces beyond imagining.

    Unbeknownst to them, they are all descended from the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as the jinn, who live in a world separated from ours by a veil. Centuries ago, Dunia, a princess of the jinn, fell in love with a mortal man of reason. Together they produced an astonishing number of children, unaware of their fantastical powers, who spread across generations in the human world.

    Once the line between worlds is breached on a grand scale, Dunia’s children and others will play a role in an epic war between light and dark spanning a thousand and one nights—or two years, eight months, and twenty-eight nights. It is a time of enormous upheaval, in which beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease, and a noise may contain a hidden curse.

    Inspired by the traditional “wonder tales” of the East, Salman Rushdie’s novel is a masterpiece about the age-old conflicts that remain in today’s world. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is satirical and bawdy, full of cunning and folly, rivalries and betrayals, kismet and karma, rapture and redemption.

    Praise for Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

    “Rushdie is our Scheherazade. . . . This book is a fantasy, a fairytale—and a brilliant reflection of and serious meditation on the choices and agonies of our life in this world.”—Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian

    “One of the major literary voices of our time . . . In reading this new book, one cannot escape the feeling that [Rushdie’s] years of writing and success have perhaps been preparation for this moment, for the creation of this tremendously inventive and timely novel.”—San Francisco Chronicle

    “A wicked bit of satire . . . [Rushdie] riffs and expands on the tales of Scheherazade, another storyteller whose spinning of yarns was a matter of life and death.”—USA Today

    “A swirling tale of genies and geniuses [that] translates the bloody upheavals of our last few decades into the comic-book antics of warring jinn wielding bolts of fire, mystical transmutations and rhyming battle spells.”—The Washington Post

    “Great fun . . . The novel shines brightest in the panache of its unfolding, the electric grace and nimble eloquence and extraordinary range and layering of his voice.”—The Boston Globe
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherPenguin Random House Audio Publishing Group
    Release dateSep 8, 2015
    ISBN9781101926697
    Author

    Salman Rushdie

    Salman Rushdie is the author of many acclaimed novels, including Midnight’s Children (winner of the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Grimus, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and The Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights—and a collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published works of nonfiction, including Joseph Anton (a memoir of his life under the fatwa issued after the publication of The Satanic Verses), The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line—and co-edited the anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

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    Reviews for Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

    3.5/5

    267 ratings37 reviews

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    • 5/5
      This book is a bit of a genre-bender, a modern take on fantasy that edges into science fiction despite being about Fairyland and jinnis that turn up in our world in a sort of proxy war during a power struggle that results in a regime change in Fairyland. Blended into this story are various theosophical concepts about the nature and existence of gods, the nature and existence of good and evil, and the role of mankind in the universe. But these philosophical threads are just tangents to the primary tale, which is fantasy, essentially, a story told by people far in our future, about a time still in our future but much closer to us. And, since Rushdie didn't state a particular date for these events, his book won't suffer the obsolescence that so many near-future stories do once the date they focus on is over and no jinnis, or bizarre supernatural activity, or great wars have turned up.
      I've read a few Rushdie books so far, after avoiding his writing for years fearing it would be just about political current events in Israel or the Middle East. But, so far the books I've read have all just been rather creative fantasy or magical realism, with more characters from Southwest Asia and North Africa, but not particularly about any heavy sociopolitical situations in our real world. I definitely recommend his books, so far, for fantasy and sci-fi readers looking for new stories in these genres.
    • 3/5
      My friend recommended this book to me by saying it was too weird and fantasy-like for her. A blend of fantasy and literature, and based on the blurb perhaps some magical realism too? Sounded perfect to me!

      It started out promising, with jinns and jinnias and clever wordplay - and then it stayed just that. Clever, and witty, with sentences that run for paragraphs, referencing older stories, and history, describing famous people without using their name, that kind of stuff. Usually I sort of like that, finding these little easter eggs makes me feel smart, but in this case it was just too much. It was almost desperately self-conscious, trying to be intelligent and interesting.

      The story itself was.. ok. Not great, not terrible. It sort of drowned in all the wittiness, and in the second half it also started drowning in the rants against faith, and believers, and religion. It wasn't offensive, just.. well, boring, to be honest.

      We get the point - fear is used to drive people to religion, religion is used to oppress the masses, but the manipulating masterminds don't realise that this strategy will eventually lead to those masses turning away from faith. Also, in the purely hypothetical case that there actually is a god, he/she/it would want us, their children, to grow up and become independent. Fine, get on with the story instead of making these points over and over again.

      Wouldn't recommend, won't read again.
    • 4/5
      The usual delightful richness from Rushdie. His books always make me think of the little threads that connect us to one another - reminding me of the size of the world.

      It was both a terrifying and hopeful book to read in the age of Trump - though it was obviously written before this year it resonates well.

      Except in this case we have 1,404 days to go. Three years, 10 months and three days by my reckoning. Watch for flying urns until then...
    • 4/5
      This book is suitably surreal and magical enough to be part of Rushdie's output. It revolves around jinn and humans coming in contact after a separation of a thousand years, and the mayhem that ensues. In the end, the fate of the world rests in the hands of one woman...and a couple of half human descendants. The main issue I have with the book is that it is almost all build up; the climax is over almost before it begins. The final epic battle is unsatisfying either as a battle or as a story. There are a lot of loose ends; that isn't always a bad thing, but in this case it sort of seemed like he just got to a point where he got sick of the story and said "the hell with it, I'll write an ending and be done". The ending was not worthy of Rushdie, though the rest of the book was. Overall, an easy and fun read.
    • 3/5
      That was interesting. Very dense, a little disconnected, and a little strange, but an interesting take on the 1001 Nights storytelling tradition. 3.5 stars.
    • 4/5
      In this artful and amusing book, Salman Rushie combines a clever riff on the Arabic 1001 Nights tales with a harsh critical look at both Islamic and Euro-American ideological narrowmindedness.
      The story is first of all an amusing literary recreation of the 1001 Nights in modern times. Here the jinn are sometimes evil and sometimes benevolent, but mostly uninterested in the pathetic low-lifes that inhabit Earth. That changes when their vanity drives some of them to undertake a cataclysmic battle for the attention of humans. Rushdie has fun with his readers in creating a satire that draws parallels through a wide range of literary allusions and human foolishness. I particularly liked the mystery Baby Storm who destroys careers by causing the flesh of the lying and corrupt to decay hideously.
      A more profound theme underlying the book is the conflict between reason and unreason, or religion as Rushdie identifies it. Cleverly, Rushie identifies the rational thinkers with the descendants of the Islamic scientist and philosopher Averroes, or Ibn Rushd in Arabic. Thus, his descendants are Rushdis and, like Rushdie, targets of repression by religious fundamentalists who gain their power by convincing their followers to believe their pronouncements, however irrational. The book is in part an attack on the Islamic fundamentalists who tried to have Rushdie killed for ridiculing Islam. In one section, parasitic jinni of the irrational forces occupy human bodies and turn them into airline attackers and suicide bombers. And while it seems nightmarish, Rushie makes it a comedy, with his cutting satire and imaginative storyline. Ibn Rushd and his rival, the mystic Al-Ghazali, for example, dispute philosophy in life, and then centuries after their death, the conflict becomes so intense that their dust is driven to resurrect their debates. So while a philosophical debate underlies the novel, Rushie’s skill as a storyteller makes it an amusing and moving tale.
      He also allows love, perhaps the most irrational of all human activities, to lead the fight against the irrational, so he’s not a simple rationalist. And while Rushie shows clearly which side he wants to win, he ends the novel by saying that in the new world of peaceful freedom, reason has left God out, but now we don't dream. Life is good, but we sometimes yearn for nightmares, he says.
      It’s also interesting to identify the varied links that Rushdie drops to world cultures, ranging from the Muslim cultures to the touchpoints of Western culture, including Greeks, Candide and contemporary television and movies. These references not only tie Rushdie’s thinking to world cultures, but they make the novel more than a fantasy. They show that it is a serious novel relevant to contemporary readers.
      Rushdie’s writing style is as entertaining as his story. Often I stopped either to laugh at an ironic or ridiculous image or to credit an eloquent phrase or social observation. Some critics have objected that the characters are not fully developed, they are cartoons, and the storyline is too simple. This is true, but it didn’t reduce my enjoyment of the novel. It is, after all, a fable, and fables are not written for complexity. They are written to make a point in a direct way. In this, I expect that the novel is a parallel to the 1001 Nights – a series of fairly simple stories that make a point. (But I don’t want to be definitive on that, as I’ve only read the 1001 Nights in a simple version years ago.)
      Rushdie makes his point, and entertains at the same time. All in all, this is a thoughtful and amusing read, and it encourages me to watch for more novels by Rushdie.
    • 4/5
      I brought this book with me on the road trip home for Christmas, and most it I read in the car. Parts of it I found so brilliant that I couldn't help reading aloud clever or beautiful passages to my husband. Other sections were a bit of a slog. Where they just a slog because I was trapped in a car with my family and the kids were noisy from time to time? I don't know, I wouldn't rule it out. But I found this book uneven with flashes of incandescence.

      So the story is present-ish day, but with djinn, but it's told as if being written in the far future, looking back in a tumultuous period in earth's history. I suppose the effect is supposed to riff on reading One Thousand and One Nights now, looking back at a somewhat foreign point in history. I think I didn't ever really settle into this mindset, and I might enjoy going back and reading it again with that frame more fully in mind. I was reading it more as a contemporary fantasy, and I think that's where some of my struggles come from, as it just isn't structured that way. It's more episodic in nature and favorite characters just disappear. sometimes to return later, sometimes to be summarily killed off almost as footnotes.

      A unique tale that makes me feel like I need to read more Rushdie.
    • 4/5
      This one has everything that I should love about a novel: jinn in the modern world, a unique reworking of favorite folktales and fairytales, stories within stories, and an author who is capable of gorgeous wordsmithery. But, well, it just didn't work for me. And that makes me pretty sad. I was so looking forward to a Rushdie version of 1001 Nights, but I didn't like any of the characters and got impatient with the slowness of the prose. Maybe it's just me? At any rate, I won't give up on Rushdie because he's swept me off my feet in the past and I remain hopeful that I'll find that magic with him again.
    • 4/5
      Of course he can write and I'd rather read sentences crafted by Sir Salman than perhaps any other living writer, but I got a bit lost in this giant battle of the Jinn. I know that there were metaphors going on here but they wore me out a bit. I've had better times reading Rushdie than this.
    • 4/5
      A fine little piece of fantasy. My first Rushdie book, and I confess disappointment. Like much of Tolkien, the unfurling of the setting was more majestic than the plot. There were so many details and yet so much ground left unexplored that I could easily imagine a stable of writers penning dozens of novels within the universe, much like the Star Wars series of books or Dragonlance. It made me want to play Dungeons and Dragons more than it made me want to keep reading.
    • 4/5
      The title is an indicator, clearly alluding to a famous collection of tales of wonder, promising (as it then does) exotic happenings, digressions, meanderings and stories within stories. Yet it is also somehow unmistakably Rushdian. Exotic but recognisable, aslant but accessible. In any case, I doubt any other present day author would invite comparison to such a well-known set of stories as the Arabian Nights. But the conceit doesn’t come from nowhere. If he perhaps hasn’t addressed the supernatural quite as directly in most of his previous novels there has nearly always been more than a hint of the strange, brushes with the uncanny, in Rushdie’s work. So here we have jinn (not genies, no, we don’t use that word any more) the Grand Ifrits, Zumurrud the Great, Zabardast the Sorcerer, Shining Ruby the Possessor of Souls - so slender he disappears when he turns sideways - Ra’im the Blood-Drinker, the source of all the world’s vampire stories, and the jinnia Dunia, otherwise known as Aasmaan Peri, aka the Sky Fairy and the Lightning Princess of Mount Qâf.

      The narrative is couched as a looking back at the legendary time when the seals between the worlds eroded, a great storm struck the Earth and the Strangenesses began. Yet the story begins over 800 years earlier, in 1195, with the arrival at the house of the philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes) of a young homeless girl. This was Dunia, indulging her fascination with human men and her capacity for love. For two years eight months and twenty-eight nights they lived as man and wife and produced numerous offspring, whose descendants, all characterised by their lobeless ears, became the Duniazát. Not named after him as, “To be the Rushdi would send them into history with a mark upon their brow.” Ibn Rushd’s dispute with the philosophy of a predecessor, Ghazali, “Only fear will move sinful man towards God,” and who stated that things happen only because God wills them, provides us with disquisitions on God’s nature, “God is a creation of human beings; the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle.” These differences are played out on a grander scale during the war between the worlds that followed the Strangenesses.

      During that time rationality crumbled. Some found their feet didn’t touch the ground and might float away so high that they died, others were weighed down so that they became crushed. A baby born during the storm caused outbreaks of sores on anyone corrupt or dishonest into whose vicinity she came. The irrational became commonplace. The Duniazát had inherited some of Dunia’s jinn powers and were invaluable in the final confrontations with the Grand Ifrits. The whole time of Strangeness lasted, of course, two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights.

      Lines like, “If I get hurt in this putative affray of yours then I’m not an innocent bystander?” to a policeman from a musician at risk from the incitements of a rabid preacher show that the events of Rushdie’s life so far have contributed mightily to this - as, I assume, theirs must necessarily do for all but hack authors. Yet while the novel contains all Rushdie’s strengths, it also manifests and perhaps magnifies his faults. There is not much restraint here, there is a lot of telling, the treatment is, as ever, consciously literary and full of word play (Lebanonymous; “all the gold, men, in your sacks will not save you.”) Yet the retrospective narrator defuses any tension in the reader as to the eventual outcome. Rushdie also feels it necessary to define FTL despite name-checking eleven masters of the golden age of science fiction.

      However, the book is mainly a meditation on the nature of story. “All our stories contain the stories of others and are themselves contained within larger, grander narratives.” “The first thing to know about made-up stories is that they are all untrue in the same way,” (which feels Tolstoyan but is certainly debatable.) “To tell a story about the past is to tell a story about the present.” That stories tell us what we are; we tell them in order to understand ourselves. Quite where the incursion of the supernatural leaves us with that one is rather problematic. “To recount a fantasy is to tell a tale about the actual.” Well, maybe. “If good and evil were external to Man, it became impossible to define what an ethical man might be,” is closer to the mark.

      In general Rushdie is at his best when his flights of fancy are tethered more firmly to earthly events, more centred on his human characters which here are too thinly delineated. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is pyrotechnic, impressive even, undoubtedly worth reading, but, ultimately, curiously lacking in heart.
    • 2/5
      Mhm. Rushdie has written three books that I like very much, and some I can't get warm with. This is one of the latter group. Too abstract for me (late in the book, the jinn are even called abstractions), I couldn't get interested in most characters.
      The plot reminded me of DC Comics' 1990s crossover event "Bloodlines" (Rushie himself uses a lot of explicit comic book associations in this book, so this idea may be forgiven), which I didn't care for: Gruesome aliens attacking Earth on a grand scale, with new superheroes born through alien meddling. Plucky individuals and secret plans that I couldn't follow.
    • 3/5
      A pretty bizarre book. Impossible for the mere mortal to imagine the imagination of this author. A terrifying struggle of good and evil involving mythology, the upper world, fairys, graphic monsters. It's a roiling pot but as one would expect some significant truisms and philosophical ideas beautfiully put and pondered. Recommended by one of my literary of all friends. I could listen but may not have continued to read this....
    • 2/5
      Not Salman Rushdie’s best effort. There was the usual mix of jinns, philosophers, religious figures, legends, characters of multiple backgrounds, God(s), fate, and storytelling a la "1001 Nights," but it felt like a mailed-in effort, because none of the normal characters around which all this imaginative machinery was deployed was him-or-herself particularly imaginative or even sympathetic. In addition, all too often it seemed Rushdie was winking at me from the page, so pleased with the joke he had just told, he wanted to make sure the reader didn’t miss his cleverness. In a word, it was a bit precious, without the intimacy of prior efforts.

      Ostensibly, this is a retelling from the future of a war between powerful jinns taking place more or less in the present time. (The text is littered with references to terrible modern day events, from school shootings to Donald Trump.) Because the membrane between the other world of the jinns and the human world has weakened, the jinns conduct their war in the human world. The war begins with “strangenesses” in which the laws of physics of our world give way; for example, many characters no longer are fully subject to gravity and begin to float like balloons while others are crushed under a supergravity. The strangenesses give way to outright warfare.

      The outcome of the war is never in doubt because of the structure of the novel, which is a little bit like a holy book recording the long ago clashes that made the present of the narrator more wonderful than the current world. In that future world, resort to God and religion has been rejected, but with its eradication has come the loss of dreams at night. While at certain points Rushdie manages to cleverly portray real life events of our own world as themselves “strangenesses,” where facts and science give way to opinion, lust, and the irrational, in my view, the novel never really achieved a coherent story or convinced me to care much about the human characters or various jinns.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 2/5
      I’m not really sure where to start with this one. I liked the premise and it was by an author I’d heard of, but had never read. Unfortunately, the book just didn’t hold up to my expectations.

      The book opened with a textbook-like explanation of the djinn. I didn’t mind necessarily, but it felt odd and wasn’t a very good way to capture readers. The next passage lost some of its textbook-like quality, instead attempting to tell a fairy-tale type story. But the fairy-tale lacked the spark that turns mere words into magic.

      I wound up not finishing the book. The passages were just too long – overly-long paragraphs that filled the majority of a page and, at times, were chocked full of back and forth dialogue (not an issue, necessarily, but definitely a personal pet peeve). I just couldn't get into the story. It just wasn’t my sort of book, and did wind up on my extraordinarily short did not finish list.

      That said, its clear from the style of writing that this author has tremendous potential, and I do really want to read some of his other more well-known works. Perhaps if you’re a fan of the author you’ll enjoy this story.
    • 3/5
      Personally I blame David Mitchell. This idea of incorporating elements of fantasy into literary fiction can work really well. But it seems that every book I pick up these days is, to a greater or lesser extent, infected with fantasy or science fiction tropes. And I enjoy Mitchell's work, whilst still believing that his stories would be extremely strong and enjoyable without the intervention of characters from other dimensions. I also understand the need to get away from realism - our world today is filled with so much depression and gloom that we perhaps need to get away from it all with some flights of fantasy and thoughts of hidden forces for good awaiting awakening

      But not every writer can do this; I recently read The Buried Giant by Kazuo Ishiguro which has elements of fantasy. That works very well - its possibly Ishiguro's best book, which is saying something. Rushdie is less successful. We all know that he likes a good magic story; anyone who has read "Haroun" or "Luka" will attest to that. He also loves his science fiction - as anyone who has had the misfortune to endure Grimus will know. And magic realism has been the basis of his career and reputation.

      But in this book he abandons realism completely, and for me it doesn't work. I found myself as uninterested in the wars of the jinns and the jinnia and the proxy battles fought by the jinnias descendants as I would be by a Transformers film. Its just not my thing. Yes I know there are references to popular culture, yes I know there are digs at the repression brought by religion, yes there's a lot sex (the author seems unhealthily obsessed by genie action) but it just leaves me cold. And its possibly derivative (where else did I recently read about a character who's feet didn't touch the floor? I am sure that's familiar)

      For me, way too much magic, not enough realism.
    • 2/5
      It was fine.
      I listened to the audiobook edition, and it was fine.
      The way in which the book was narrated -- from hundreds of years in the future, by cooly rational (and very unemotional) ancestors of ours -- made the book read more like the equivalent of watching someone set up a chess board than a thoroughly engaging story of love across the ages and the war of reason against faith.
      The story had its moments and was an interesting premise (the ancestors of a jinnia and rationalist philosopher down the ages) but some of the magical element was lost, perhaps intentionally, by the dry, almost academic rendering from the future, in which dreams have even been expunged.
      It's also very hard to separate the global phenomenon that Rushdie is from his work. I couldn't help but think he is directly addressing critics or ex-wives from his writing. Every caricature of the urbane older gent walking around New York City I can't help but picture with Rushdie's grinning face. I didn't mind this so much, but it was just something that kept coming to mind as I listened to the book.
    • 5/5
      By all means do not allow the reputation of Salman Rushdie prevent you from reading his latest novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Days. Like all his works – with the possible exception of The Satanic Verses – his latest novel contains jokes, puns, humor, and erudition of every sort. According to his website, Rushdie has won numerous awards from around the world, including the U.S., France, Germany, The European Union, Mexico, Italy, Hungary, and India, to name only a few. He holds honorary doctorates and fellowships at six European and six American universities, is an Honorary Professor in the Humanities at M.I.T, and University Distinguished Professor at Emory University. His list of humanitarian and cultural awards from around the world is equally impressive. His Booker Prize winning novel, Midnight’s Children, was adapted for the stage in London and New York, and by a public vote, the novel was overwhelmingly named the “Best of the Booker.” It was also turned into a film and translated into forty languages. Only the Nobel Prize eludes him, which, in my opinion, stems from the unfortunate uproar surrounding the publication of Satanic Verses. He is truly an international literary treasure.

      Deep in to the novel, Rushdie provides an interesting theory of “story.” He writes, “We tell this story still as it has come down to us through many retellings, mouth to ear, ear to mouth, both the story and the poisoned box and the stories it contained, in which the poison was concealed. This is what stories are, experience retold by many tongues, to which, sometimes, we give a single name, Homer, Valmiki, Vyasa, Schererzade. 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” (182-183).

      Admittedly, reading Rushdie requires great concentration, lest the reader miss out on all the fun. My review will concentrate only on the second chapter, which has all his powerful attributes at full strength. The novel revolves around the tales in the style of the thousand and one tales of Scheherazade; that is, the story of a jinniri, Dunia, who slipped between worlds and interacted with ordinary mortals. Some of these jinni (male) or jinniri (female), were good, some evil, but all were mischievous. Ibn Rushd fell under the spell of the princess of the jinniri, and she produced thousands of children, all of whom had no earlobes. Her group of jinniri were known as Duniazát, and Rushd forbade her to take his name for any of the children. Hundreds of years later, a descendant of Dunia, Raphael Heironymus Manzes known as Mr. Geronimo Manzes, had no earlobes. When the slit between the worlds opened again, jinni and jinniri poured into our world, wreaking havoc known as “The Strangenesses.” Geronimo was affected when he suddenly found himself unable to touch the ground with any part of his body. He had been away many years, and found the new Bombay – Mumbai – dramatically different. Rushdie writes, “It was the garden that spoke to Geronimo. It seemed to be clawing at the house, snaking its way inside, trying to destroy the barriers that separated the exterior space from the interior. In the upper regions of the house, flowers and grass successfully surmounted its walls, and the floor became a lawn. He left that place knowing he no longer wanted to be an architect. […] Manzes made his way to Kyoto in Japan and sat at the feet of the great horticulturist Ryonosuke Shimura, who taught him that the garden was the outward expression of inner truth, the place where the dreams of our childhoods collided with the archetypes of our cultures, and created beauty” (35).

      Salman Rushdie’s intellectual allegory, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Days, brings to one time and place – the present – and lays all the problems and difficulties we face from climate change to financial collapse at the feet of the jinni and jinniri. The web of “Magic Realism” stories Rushdie has spun will enchant and dismay at times, but those tales will always intrigue. 5 stars

      --Jim, 12/19/15
    • 3/5
      I won an advance reader copy of Salman Rushdie’s Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Days through the Goodreads First Reads Giveaways.

      Rushdie showcases a time when the worlds of the humans and Jinn collide. A jinnia, Dunia, falls in love with an elder philosopher, Ibn Rushd, centuries ago. After a cataclysmic storm, a wormhole was opened and the dark jinn entered the human world kicking off 1001 nights of unusual activity. Dunia gathers her progeny, who have jinn blood and latent powers, to fight the dark forces.

      Rushdie adeptly intertwines many different themes into the fabric of the story; mysticism, realism, philosophy, romance, and social commentary. I loved the humor and chuckled throughout the book. I can appreciate this novel intellectually, but it fell a little flat for me as a reader. It seems Rushdie was focusing on the broader concepts, but missed the point of telling a good story.
    • 3/5
      This is classic Salman Rushdie. One thousand and one nights is re-imagined as a modern (as well as ancient) fairy tale for adults. It was witty and lyrical but filled with enough characters and stories within a story to make my head spin. I admit that sometimes it was hard to pick up the story, but it really flowed when I had more time to read. I would suggest that potential readers keep this in mind and devote longer blocks of time to it rather than trying to read it in bits and pieces.
    • 3/5
      Don't we all want to like Rusdie's books? Wasn't "Midnight's Children" something new and exciting? Haven't we dipped into Rushdie books in these later years and come away shaking our heads in bewilderment? Is this a good book I just don't get, or is it something less?

      Many Amazon reviewers (there are 96 reviews as of this writing) discuss Rushdie's examination of the potential for magic in our world, the existence among us of people with unusual skills (no magic necessarily needed) and the strange ways that religion acts on rationality. These are all wonderful themes but I wonder if it isn't time for Rushdie to move on a bit.

      As a reader, my difficulty with Rushdie's books is the style, one I have written about previously as being sentences in a line, like a train. To me this a 1970s style that has not passed the test of time. Novels do not have to be cinematic to be interesting and readable. But I do like them to have color and flavor and Rusdie's work no longer evokes emotion and interest in me.

      I received a review copy of "Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: A Novel" by Salman Rushdie (Random House) through NetGalley.com.
    • 4/5
      One thousand and one nights. That's how long the war between our world and fairyland, the world of the jinn, lasted. But roots of the war go back 1,001 years, when Dunia, a female jinn (or jinnia), fell in love with a man named Ibn Rushd. Their descendants--part human and part jinn and totally unaware of their own origins--form an army against the jinn who enter our world when the barriers between our world and the jinn's fairyland break down.

      That sounds straightforward enough, but Salman Rushdie does not tell this story in a straightforward way. This is a story in which two central characters are dead men debating God versus reason and whether the war between the worlds will drive them to belief or unbelief. So there's a philosophical element to the action. The story's narrator is speaking from long after the war, and the known history is fragmented. Most of the characters feel like characters from myth, rather than full-bodied, complex people. We're told of their feelings and motivations in the moment, but we don't get to see deeply into their souls. We learn what's necessary to the story, but not much more.

      Rushdie's style of storytelling takes tremendous skill, and the way the threads come together in the end is close to breathtaking, but the style kept me at a distance from a story that would normally grip me. It reminded me of why I so often love novels that put flesh on myths and fairy tales. I may enjoy the originals for what they are, but I'd rather spend time with a book that gives me more than semi-human objects that are moved around to suit the story. A few of Rushdie's characters come close to feeling real, but I wanted to know all of them better than I did. The gardener who suddenly levitates, Mr. Geronimo, is one example. And the vengeful Teresa Saca, who became so important to the book's conclusion, deserved more of a story than she got.

      The trouble with this book is that I wanted more of it, even though there's a lot of story here already. It's jammed with characters and with events and with ideas, but it's such a short book that few of these elements have time to breathe. With so much going on, there wasn't enough to make me care. It's a myth without flesh and bone. Give me that, too, and This pretty good book could be remarkable.
    • 4/5
      Good stuff. Recounts, from a far-future perspective, a modern-day war in which the jinn from Fairyland invade the Earth for 1001 nights, and a female jinni awakens and rallies her half-human descendants around the world to fight back. Both the narrative and prose do this kind of rambling, run-on thing but it's done in a kind of hypnotizing fashion that's a delight to read. I'm not a fan of the "moral" at the end, which boils down to "After our ancestors were invaded by supernatural beings, everybody gave up religion because reasons" but other than that, I loved it.
    • 5/5
      Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: A Novel, Salman Rushdie, author; Robert G. Slade, narrator
      I think Rushdie is brilliant. The time period in the title computes to 1001 nights. I had to do some research before I could begin to write the review because I could not remember the story of Scheherazade or The 1001 Nights which this fairytale is loosely based upon. His presentation is humorous, even though the subject is really a serious one alluding to the state of current world affairs. The tongue in cheek, sometimes very subtle references to the problems we face today are very thought provoking. This novel is much more than a fairy tale; it is a treatise on humanity, love and hate, peace and war, the future and the past. As the author states, this is a tale about Jinn, not genies, or the Jeanie of television fame who lived in a bottle and had a master. These are not the grantors of wishes. This is a race of creatures both good and evil, made up of smokeless fire.
      Ibn Rushd, a Muslim Rationalist, a man who believed in reason and morality, (your eyes do not deceive you, his name looks like the author’s name), and Theologian, Ghazali of Iran, an Islamic scholar, had a philosophical feud. Ghazali was the victor. Rushd (pronounced Roosht), was not faithful enough and was exiled to a community that was famous for being the apparently not so secret, sanctuary of Jews who could not admit they are Jews. When, one day, there was a knock on his door and a woman appeared looking for refuge, he believed that she was one of the Jews who was not a Jew or one who could not admit to being a Jew. Her name was Dunia and she was a Jinn in the body of a human. She came down to Earth from Fairyland, through a wormhole or a slit that opened between both worlds. She fell in love with Ibn, although he was human and much older than she was, and she, in this human form, stayed with him and bore him many children, creating a race of parasite Jinn. These Jinn were both feared and revered, depending on the circumstances, since it was discovered that they had special powers and were thought to spread unusual diseases. The Jinn were recognizable because they had no earlobes; they were Dunians, descendants of the Jinnia princess, Dunia. It was implied that the Jews might be their descendants, but it was not spoken of out loud because the Jinn were also thought to be the spawn of the devil. Therefore, no one wanted to say they were their descendants. The union of Ibn and Dunia set the stage for a future war and ushered in the “era of the strangenesses”.
      Abusive customs regarding the treatment of women were mocked with the use of pleasure bathhouses as were Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. They were, supposedly, not created by G-d, but rather they actually produced G-d by thinking him up after they ate the apple and this G-d was not happy about being created. I felt that by pairing Dunia and Ibn Saud, Rushdie scorned the antipathy between Muslims and Jews. He introduced many contradictory beliefs and he created interesting words like terraphiles or earth lovers.
      He analyzed the creation and destruction of civilizations, their rise and fall because of good and evil, power and weakness, language and how it was used and abused to send the wrong messages. He illustrated the use of pomp and circumstance over substance and moderation, and pointed out that people really wanted to be entertained and listened to those who spoke louder and faster more than they did to those who had substance and could educate them. (It was prescient, if one looks at the rise of Donald Trump, today, in the Presidential election polls.) Usually, people would support the person that made them smile without offering solutions over the person that told them the awful truth. He exploited the fairytale genre in the best possible way because after exposing all of the ills of society, he came to the conclusion that rationality, coherence and reason would eventually win.
      This imaginative tale is like the fairy tale that is filled with all of the elements fairytales usually possessed in order to teach children how to deal with life and death, good and evil, love and hate, artifice and betrayal, but in this version, it is teaching adults. It contains humor and life lessons as Rushdie tackled every important issue society has ever faced, and there is not a culture, religion, race, country or subject that he refrained from touching. Everything was fair game. By placing women in a society that required nothing but sex to thrive, he exposed the disrespect for women in certain cultures. He presented the obsession with drugs in some societies, a problem we continue to deal with in the present day. Every conceivable topic was disparaged sardonically and then whimsically analyzed so that rather than being insulting, the ideas were comical and self-deprecating.
      In his easy to read prose, he exposed the futility of so many ideas, the foolishness with which they are handled and the stupidity of their premises. He poked fun at broadly accepted beliefs like when he says of a character that “she believed in G-d as firmly as she hated gefilte fish” or that Adam and Eve created G-d when they began to think about him and not the other way around. He exposes the foolishness of using skin color as a measure of worth. He disdained materialism. He illuminated the way a rush to judgment could lead to wrong headed beliefs and decisions. He wrote about the liberal network MSNBC, the preservation of the petrodollar, the weakness of education and welfare programs.
      The use of the real names from the past, Ibn Rushd, Spinoza, Darwin, Descartes, Geronimo, Schopenhauer, Nietzche, served to make every allusion even more pertinent, more of a double entendre. There were colorfully named characters, as well, like Shining Ruby who inhabited the body of a financial tycoon named Daniel “mac” Aroni, Jimmy Kapoor also known as Natraj Hero, who became just that, a superhero because of his Jinn heritage, and the baby of truth, another Jinn who was able to recognize those who were not to be trusted and left her mark on them which caused them to decay. Mr. Geronimo, (aka Ibn Rushd), from India, liked the idea that the name people called him recalled to mind a famous American Indian. He was a gardener who wondered as he tended his gardens, if someone else was tending him, if he was perhaps part of someone else’s garden.
      The narrator was superb using the proper accents and expression for each scene, however, the strange words made it difficult to follow, so I would recommend the print version over the audio, or having a print version handy to look up words as you listen. All in all, this is a very good read.
    • 4/5
      More magic than realism, but well told. I imagine this was fun to write. It turned out too 'mythic' for my taste, but I did appreciate the effort.
    • 2/5
      You can’t read a books column these days without stumbling on articles about the “genre wars” or reading about a literary or mainstream writer poking around the genre stable. The blurring of genre categories has started to gain momentum, much to my elation, with writers from Margaret Atwood and David Mitchell to Colson Whitehead and Jennifer Egan all making it perfectly acceptable now to dabble in the borderlands of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, horror. Which seems like the natural evolution of things (hurray!). So it’s no surprise that Salman Rushdie has jumped on the bandwagon with such gusto in his latest novel Two Years Eight Months And Twenty-Eight Nights.

      In his new book, Rushdie takes the ready-made mythology of the jinn and creates a colliding worlds-type story complete with multiple settings and multiple timelines. It’s an ambitious effort that would generally make me swoon but instead largely bored me to tears. It took me a while to get into this novel and longer than my usual pace to finish it. The book’s main thrust starts with jinn princess Dunia. In the 12th century, Dunia makes the classic blunder of falling for a human. The human husband she takes is a philosopher named Averroes (who is also called Ibn Rusd—a self-referential wink from Rushdie, perhaps?). The couple raise a big family of half-human, half-jinni children. These descendants are magically gifted, but eventually over time and generations lose touch with their ethnic roots, so to speak. They lose their jinni identity, and their supernatural abilities also fade into oblivion/entropy.

      Fast-forward to contemporary NYC, where a Mother of all Storms suddenly bestows powers to various people. It’s inexplicable; it’s a bit random. But, yes, a storm grants Heroes-like status to a few. A character called Geronimo sort of floats off the ground; an orphan kid gives off an aura when in near proximity to people doing shady things. This Storm for the Ages also does so much more. It sparks some kind of breaking of boundaries between the supernatural world and the human world and we learn that a war that’s been brewing under the surface is now coming to the fore. Pax Jinn is over.

      Perhaps it’s just Rushdie’s awkward familiarity with the world of fantasy but there was something forced about the whole set-up, as if Rushdie decided to sprinkle some magical details here and there and hoped for the best. The result is a novel filled with canned fantasy tropes, most of the time used clumsily, and a world that is hackneyed and contrived. Detail is conflated with depth, and Rushdie seems to pile on the mythology as if he were following a template. Where this lack of sophistication is most evident is in the background we are given about the various dark forces threatening the world: Zumurrud, Shining Ruby, and the rest of the evil gang are all inflated in garish detail. It’s beyond silly and not in the least bit entertaining or compelling. Do we need the long-winded descriptions about the families and the clothes they wear and their philosophies in such tedious detail? Some writers can do this enviably well in seamless world-building, but Rusdhie splatters the canvas when he should be using a lighter hand. What’s neglected is the human element of the story. For all the flash of the various characters and their powers, they all seem so blah, so flat. It’s not elemental—it’s one-dimensional.

      The saving grace (for some readers, I assume) is that it faithfully follows the classic Rushdie pattern of exploring those big, hefty arguments for and against religion. Faith vs. secularism. And the framework inspired by Thousand and One Nights is pretty ingenious—stories within stories.

      Two Years wears its fantasy like throwaway fashion. Overall, I found the novel hastily stitched together, badly edited and organized, and disappointing. If you are new to Salman Rushdie's work, read this one with caution or look elsewhere.
    • 4/5
      This is a story of how the world in which we live became a world of order and structure by means of the mystical jinn. Dunia, the princess jinnia, left the realms of fairyland to come to earth. Once on earth she fell in love with a human, Ibn Rushd,and bore many children from him. Despite the love she came to have for him he left her to fend for herself and her children. In time he aged and died but her love for him never faltered. Many years pass when Ghazali, a nemesis of Ibn, awakens from his grave and in turn awakens Ibn to finish an argument he once had with him that being of which mankind will turn to God in time of conflict or crisis. Ibn disagrees so in order for Ghazali to prove his point he calls on Zummurrud, a jinn he had released from captivity, to wreak havoc on the human race. Dunia has wandered aimlessly since her beloved died but comes to him when he awakens but she is restless and begins to hear the voices of her children's ancestors and realizes this ensuing battle needs to be fought in order to save them and mankind. The battle commences when Dunia's father is murdered by another jinn, one of the Grand Ifrits; thus she seeks revenge and calls her children to do her will. The story was intriguing but at times dragged on until the point was finally reached. It took some adjusting to realize that the individual stories of each of her children's ancestors would eventually connect but getting to that point was challenging at times. Nonetheless it was superb.
    • 3/5
      Reading Salman Rushdie is a little like listening to jazz. There is an underlying theme embellished with copious riffs and flourishes that may or may not be relevant to the theme. As with good jazz, the latter are repeated in multiple forms often with lyricism and humor. Rushdie’s style with language is immediately recognizable and often pleasing, but can leave one “dazed and confused” if not packaged in a well-focused story. Unfortunately, this story lacks the necessary focus to make it a totally rewarding reading experience. Rushdie’s theme is grand and immediately recognizable in the world today: the conflict between faith and reason with fear driving the former and humanism the latter (think Trump v. Sanders or ISIS and the West). The story is an eclectic mix of history, fantasy, magical realism, thriller, superhero graphic, mythology, war, fable, romance, allegory and philosophy (whew!). That’s a lot to digest and track. Maintaining focus on such a novel would be a challenge for most, but Rushdie is an exceptional writer and almost pulls of this mix with humor and multiple riffs and flourishes.

      The story is equally diverse. It involves a struggle between the worlds inhabited by humans and the fantasy world of the jinn. There is no subtlety here: one side is purely evil and the other good. The human characters are interesting but not well enough developed to be anything more than cartoons. These include a gentle gardener who finds himself strangely detached from the planet, a graphic novelist who is confronted by one of his own scary characters, a baby abandoned in the mayor’s office who can identify corruption and a woman who learns to strike down enemies with lightening bolts. These characters are all decedents of Dunia, a jinn princess, and a human philosopher, Rushd. Curiously all are easily recognized as their decedents and thus demigods by missing earlobes. Dunia manages to rally them against four very dark and demonic jinn—also very flat and cartoonish—who are bent of wreaking havoc on the humans. Her motivations are a mix or revenge for the death of her father and an ongoing attachment to humans. The setting jumps abruptly between the fantasy and real worlds reminding one of a breathless child relating what happens rather than a gifted storyteller. It is possible that Rushdie does this on purpose—stories within stories almost endlessly—but the method does make for an unsettling read.

      Curiously, Rushdie seems to favor rationality over faith—although true happiness may require a little of both—but seems to abandon any attempt at a rational progression in his storytelling. This can be a fun read for those who like humorous, breakneck and chaotic tales of strange adventure. It has an important theme, but be forewarned that it is filled with a lot of jazz, some of which works.
    • 4/5
      In the twelfth century, a female jinn (a jinnia) called Dunia fell in love with a philosopher and bore many children, whose descendants were part-jinn, part-human. A thousand years later, the slits between earth and the world of the jinn reopened, sparking a battle between the dark jinn (the ifrit) and Dunia and her children. It was also a battle of philosophies, between reason and faith. Reason wins.

      Inspired by A Thousand and One Nights, this is the first novel by Rushdie that I have read. There was a lot to enjoy in it. Rushdie's writing is often very funny, and his philosophical ideas are intriguing. I was particularly intrigued by the future he envisions, a golden age of reason and equality; this story is actually being narrated by humans living one thousand years from now, in which time these events have become legendary as they were the beginning of this age of reason. I wish he had spent more time developing the philosophy. I'm not sure if this novel is typical of Rushdie's style, but that was the biggest problem for me. His prose is purposefully circuitous and repetitive, in a manner of oral storytelling, but for me it lacked focus and full development of his ideas. This was a tantalizing book that was almost, but not quite, great.

      I received an advance review copy of this book from the Early Reviewers program in 2015.