Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Starred review from May 18, 2015
In his latest novel, Rushdie (Joseph Anton) invents his own cultural narrativeâone that blends elements of One Thousand and One Nights, Homeric epics, and sci-fi and action/adventure comic books. The title is a reference to the magical stretch of time that unites the book's three periods, which are actually millennia apart. In the first period (the 12th century), jinn princess Dunia falls in love with real-life philosopher and advocate of reason and science Averroes (aka Ibn Rushd) and bears multiple children. In the second period (current day), Dunia's descendants, a group including a gardener and a young graphic novelist, are unaware of their powerful lineage (despite the fact that they inherited Dunia's trademark earlobelessness). Then they witness a great storm devastating New York; worse, a slit between the jinn world and the human world opens and the dark jinn slip through. The gardener suddenly finds himself levitating, the artist hosting jinn in his room. Dunia returns to defend the human race by confronting her four fiercest enemies, one by one: Zumurrud, Zabardast, Shining Ruby, and Ra'im Blood-Drinker. Rushdie even incorporates a third period, a far-future millennium, further tying his story together across time. His magical realism celebrates the power of metaphor, while both historic accounts and fables are imbued with familiar themes of migration and separation, reason and faith, repression and freedom. Referencing Henry James, Mel Brooks, Mickey Mouse, Gracian, Bravo TV, and Aristotle, among others, Rushdie provides readers with an intellectual treasure chest cleverly disguised as a comic pop-culture apocalyptic caprice.

Starred review from July 1, 2015
"It's a terrible thing when one speaks metaphorically and the metaphor turns into a literal truth." So writes Rushdie (Joseph Anton: A Memoir, 2012, etc.) in one of his very best books, one whose governing metaphor can be about many terrible truths indeed.Do the math, and Rushdie's title turns into a different way of counting up to 1,001 nights. Small wonder that the first characters we encounter are an exceedingly wise philosopher named, thinly, Ibn Rushd, "the translator of Aristotle," and an exceedingly beguiling supernatural being in the form of a girl of about 16 who harbors numerous secrets, not just that she's Jewish in a place overrun with Islamic fundamentalists (and where it's thus best to live as "Jews who could not say they were Jews"), but that she is, in fact, one of the jiniri, "shadow-women made of fireless smoke." Got all that? In the span of, yes, 1,001 nights, Dunia gives birth to three broods of children who, being jinn, can do all sorts of cool things, such as fly about on magic carpets or slither hither and yon like snakes. Dunia is studiously irreligious, which is perhaps more dangerous than being Jewish, inclined to say of Ibn Rushd's explanations of all the wonderful things God can do, "That's stupid." Her endless children are inclined to favor the secular over the divine as well, a complicating factor when the dimensions turn all inside out and the jinn, now in our time, are called on to battle the forces of evil that have been hiding on the other side of the metaphorical wall between-well, civilizations, maybe. Rushdie turns in a sometimes archly elegant, sometimes slightly goofy fairy tale-with a character named Bento V. Elfenbein, how could it be entirely serious?-for grown-ups: "A fairy king," he writes, and he knows whereof he speaks, "can only be poisoned by the most dreadful and powerful of words." Beguiling and astonishing, wonderful and wondrous. Rushdie at his best.

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Starred review from July 1, 2015
The jinn, Rushdie tells us, are creatures made of smokeless fire, shape-shifters infused with powers that defy our experience of gravity and time. They live in their own world, yet they can't resist meddling in our affairs. But the Lightning Princess is different. For all her fearsome mastery over the thunderbolt, she falls in love with a mortal in the twelfth century, a Spanish Arab philosopher whose books, the most famous of which is The Incoherence of the Incoherence, are banned and burned because he argues for rationalism instead of religious fundamentalism. This man of reason is Ibn Rushd, the very thinker Rushdie's father honored when he invented a new, more modern family. Now this historic figure serves as the guiding light for his namesake's latest rambunctious, satirical, and bewitching metaphysical fable, perhaps his most thoroughly enjoyable to date. At once a scholar, rigorous observer, and lavishly imaginative novelist, Rushdie channels his well-informed despair over the brutality and absurdity of human life into works of fantasy, where the dream of righteous justice and transcendent liberty can flourish. His thirteenth work of fiction begins with the fateful liaison between the lovely jinn and the old philosopher, which, thanks to Dunia's supernatural fertility, produces the first generation of an undetected tribe of descendants who look and feel human but who lack earlobes and possess secret jinn powers. Rushdie leaps forward 1,000 years from now, when future chroniclers look back to our fraught, accelerating epoch to tell a tale of the time of strangenesses, which lasted for two years, eight months and twenty-eight days, which is to say, one thousand nights and one night more. With this enchanting declaration, Rushdie adds a new link to the long narrative chain that connects us to that most marvelous and life-saving of storytellers, Scheherazade, who risked her life to put an end to a king's murderous rampage by telling him 1,001 beguiling tales. Brave and brilliant Scheherazade has inspired countless writers through the ages. Rushdie acknowledged his debt in earlier works, including The Moor's Last Sigh (1996), and homage is also found in Naguib Mahfouz's Arabian Nights and Days (1995), Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow (2010), Rabih Alameddine's The Hakawati (2008), Nelida Pinon's Voices of the Desert (2009), and John Barth's Chimera (1972) and The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004), which takes place directly after September 11, 2001. The long spell of strangenesses is precipitated by an apocalyptic storm that devastates New York City. In its aftermath, a hardworking gardener, an earlobe-less Indian from India known as Mr. Geronimo, finds that his feet no longer touched the ground. Meanwhile, in Queens, a wormhole opens between the worlds of the jinn and humans in the bedroom of Jimmy Kapoor, a young wannabe graphic novelist. Many more manifestations of the wondrous, weird, and inexplicable occur as a war of the worlds begins, stoked from beyond by none other than Ibn Rushd, still loved by Dunia, and his real-life archrival, the religious thinker Ghazali, who, in Rushdie's fabulist scenario, is aligned with the most terrifying jinn of them all. Philosophy, like religion, can be dangerous. Rushdie is having wickedly wise fun here. Every character has a keenly hilarious backstory, and the action (flying carpets and urns, gigantic attacking serpents, lightning strikes, to-the-death combat, sex) surges from drastic and pulse-raising to exuberantly madcap, magical, and genuinely emotional. Rushdie scatters intriguing allusions (Beckett, Magritte, Gogol, Obama) about...

August 1, 2015

What if today's violence and political instability could be blamed on jinnis? That is the premise of this latest novel from Rushdie (The Enchantress of Florence). Here, the War of the Two Worlds is a proxy war between dark and light jinnis and also a war between religious fundamentalism and reason, with roots going back to 12th-century Spain and the dusty corpses of two philosophers, Ghazali and Ibn Rushd. Ghazali, having rescued a powerful jinn named Zumurrud Shah from a bottle, used one of his wishes to send Zumurrud to wreak havoc on Earth. In contrast, Rushd was a man of reason, as well as a lover of the jinnia Dunia and the forefather of the Duniazat, a tribe of human-jinni hybrids birthed by Dunia, who has a weakness for humanity. The hybrids are unaware of their jinn heritage, and with the dark jinn deploying events such as war, terrorism, and global climate change as weapons, it is up to Dunia to activate the jinn in her descendants so they can fight Zumurrud and his friends (imagine drunken jinni frat boys run amok on Earth). VERDICT Most readers will overlook Rushdie's not-so-subtle scolding in this rollicking magical realist adventure, which is fast paced and accessible. It can be enjoyed as a fairy-tale adventure, literary fiction, or a political allegory for our times. [See Prepub Alert, 3/23/15.]--Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

April 15, 2015

Centuries ago, a princess of wild and wanton Fairyland fell in love with a mortal man who espoused rationality, and their descendants have set off a battle between light and dark, reason and hidebound conviction, that will last two years eight months and 28 nights--that is, 1001 nights. Thus does Booker Prize-winning Rushdie use magical fairy-tale style to challenge the notion that fairy-tale thinking should prevail.

Copyright 2015 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.