Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty-one Nights by Salman Rushdie (EPUB)

Description

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 the descendants of the whimsical, capricious, wanton creatures known as jinns, 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 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 the 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, where beliefs are challenged, words act like poison, silence is a disease and a noise may contain a hidden curse.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐A fairy from the fairyland has descended on earth and fallen in love with a doctor philosopher Ibn Rushd. Dunia the princess of fairyland has bestowed the planet with the fruits of her love, a motley hoard called Duniazat. At this point the story switches to the present where New York City is grappling with a terrible storm opening a wormhole to the Upper World through which pop out the dark jinns intent on annihilating and subjugating the human race. The only saviours will be the bastard brood duniazat discovered and enlightened to their latent powers by their great-great-great-great-great-great-great grandmother Dunia. In this War of Worlds on one side are the dark forces led by the park jinn Grand Ifrit Zumurrud Shah accompanied by his bickering lot of Zabardast the Sorcerer, Shining Ruby the Possessor of Souls and Ra’im Blood-Drinker while Dunia leads the brighter side accompanied by her lover Mr. Geronimo the gardener who had “taken leave of solid ground and moved upwards into…more speculative territory”, Natraj Hero aka Jimmy Kapoor the prancing and dancing destroyer fashioned after Lord Shiva, Baby Storm- the miracle baby who can identify corruption by mere sight and Mother Teresa with lightning bolts streaming from her fingers. What follows is a tempestuous journey through this world and that, past and present, reason and unreason, good and evil, real and fantasy!Though the work may seem like magical realism to the uninitiated, the book is infact an allegory of the current state of the world viewed in retrospection from the future. A thought provoking work wherein the surface has to be scratched to get to the actual allusion of the author. Rushdie questions the philosophy of faith as opposed to ungodliness in no uncertain terms which more or less seems to be the thread running throughout the book.The unique and beautiful prose of Salman Rushdie keeps the reader enchanted for the entirety of the book. Going by precedent the author walks us through a variety of seemingly unrelated people and their stories only to weave them all together effortlessly. His grasp of the language is truly phenomenal. It is relatively easy to appreciate the kind of distance the writer maintains while narrating the book which only enhances the feeling of being told a historical fairy-tale; it keeps the reader hooked without making him overly attached to the characters.This is a great book if one can comprehend the import of the words and the underlying story but may be a waste for people looking for a straight forward and racy read. Like the other works by the author, this book also requires a certain degree of commitment by the reader. And for those left wondering, the title of the book refers to the length of the time of the war- 1001 nights.

⭐You know the story in which heroes with super powers are born scattered across the earth and come together to beat a super villain? You might immediately guess ‘The Midnight Children’ but this is not it. There are many differences, but not many enough to make you not try the comparison and deny any overlap. This story goes from the grandeur of the Ifrits and Jinnia of Arabia to the unaesthetic description of Natraj Hero naaching down the avenue, a woman politician “draining the swamp” with a baby that issues judgement with plague, and an elderly protagonist, a gardener, who hovers above the ground leading to some innovative love making experimentation with his employer.This is not half of the extravaganza that the rest of the book presents; Flying urns, lightning bolts, resurrected philosophers, wormholes and portals to Peristan or the land of the fairies, Grand Ifrits destroying New York City’s Skyscrapers while public ignoring it as some silly King Kong Movie promotion (Yes!). You need to suspend reality for this book, not because this is a science-fictitious fairy tale, not because the timeline spans from creation of the human race to the post-apocalyptic future, but because these elements that are so common in literature and film are presented in such a convoluted way (Salman Rushdie’s speciality), that you might not be ready to process them immediately.The book is neither an classic Good vs Evil Hero’s Tale nor does it have a woke social message hidden in it. It is what it is, like Dali’s Eggs or Korsikov’s Bumblebee. It is a story that will always stand out, an experience that will tell you that you have read it.

⭐The latest Salman Rushdie novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty Eight nights, is more a magical fantasy than magical realism. It was not what I had expected it to be, but it was something I hadn’t read before. The moment I reached the tenth page, I knew it was not the kind of Magical-realism I had been expecting to read, I do not even know if it could come under Magical realism, because of the high fantasy moments it had. It was more a mixture of high fantasy, magical realism, and mythology. But the basic (or underlying?) plot, the debate between two philosophers, one who believes in God, and other, the Reason, was more than enough for me to turn the pages until I reached the end.Salman, in this book, redefines everything we’ve known about Genies, by everything I mean the funny genie we were shown in Aladdin and the magic lamp (He calls them Jinn, their original name), and gives a whole new meaning to them.He tells us a lot of things about mythology here; for instance, the fallen angel, Lucifer, is not a Jinn, like many think. And the Greek god, Proteus, is a Jinn! He, even, compares Terminator’s Sky-net with God, and how the man-created god takes control of the man gradually. It finally ends with the phrase that goes something like this, “Finally, fear did not drive people towards god, but fear was overcome, and god was left, like children would leave their toys when they move from childhood to adulthood”.

⭐I was taken with the opening chapter. The book begins in 1195, during the temporary exile to Lucena from the court of Cordoba of the great Arabic philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes), advocate of “Reason, Logic and Science”. He had been exiled by the followers of Al-Ghazali who had relied entirely on faith and had mocked philosophy for incoherence. In Lucena, Ibn Rushd met and took to bed Dunia, a jinn who was trying to live like a human. He told her stories for 1001 nights (two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights), and three times she was made pregnant by him, producing at least 37 children who were all jinns and all had missing earlobes. When he was recalled from exile, he left her behind. She produced more children from other men before she returned to Peristan (fairy land) and “slipped out of history”; but her children and children’s children spread all over the world during the succeeding centuries.But after that opening chapter I was so completely lost that I had to give the book up before I was a quarter of the way through (though I dipped here and there into later chapters). We are in the twentieth century, and Rushdie rambles all over the place, darting from one descendant to another, from one continent to another (especially from New York to Bombay), from one episode to another, and spatters his text with all sorts of allusions to historical events and to philosophical texts. It’s doubtlessly very clever, in a show-off sort of way; but I found it a real rag-bag, bemusing and therefore totally uninvolving. Al Ghazali had written a book called “The Incoherence of the Philosophers”, to which Ibn RUSHD had replied with one called “The Incoherence of the Incoherence.” Salman RUSHDIE is incoherent, too – knowingly so, since one of the locations is an estate called La Incoerenza; and perhaps it reflects an incoherence he sees in the world around us. Everything we know about Rushdie tells us that he is an opponent of the fierce religiosity and Puritanism that Al-Ghazali had stood for; but in his Magic Realism Rushdie has espoused none of Ibn Rushd’s “Reason, Logic and Science”. In his charming book “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” (see my Amazon review), he had stressed the importance of the Imagination, but in this book his imagination has really run away with him.

⭐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.

⭐The only problem with this and other of Rushdie’s novels is what to do when you get to the white space (in this case, much too early at page 286) and the storyteller departs with his characters that are both out of this world and in it, his philosophy, his humour and all of the magic he has created. The answer is to go back to page 1 and begin again.

⭐Another total masterpiece by Salman Rushdie. I had not read anything so beautiful in a LONG LONG TIME. He really deserves a Nobel Price for Literature. It’s about time. SPLENDID.

⭐A preposterous story of magic and madness that would have been ruined in the hands of many is something funny, heartbreaking, exciting and ridiculous when told by Rushdie. It won’t be for everyone, but if you like Rushdie it’ll hit the sweet spot. If you’ve never read him, start with Shalimar the clown or The enchantress of Florence, get warmed up and then give this a go. Like all his books it is highly rewarding of you stick with it

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