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

Rating: 3.5 out of 5 stars

3.5/5

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Currently unavailable

About this audiobook

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.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 8, 2015
ISBN9781101926697
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Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights: A Novel
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

Rating: 3.4937759037344396 out of 5 stars
3.5/5

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  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    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.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    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....
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    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.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    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 awakeningBut 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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    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...
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    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.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    3/5
    Strange events start happening to people in New York without earlobes after a storm. A gardener's finds himself several inches off the ground; an abandoned baby is able to identify corruption; a graphic novelist confronts his own creation. Turns out that they are all descendants of the jinn Dunia to the tenth or twelfth generation and her marriage to the mortal Ibn Rushd, and the storm has opened a portal between human and the jinn world and a war between light and darkness has begun.I tried very hard to like this book. It's by a famous author, it's full of fantasy, it's billed as a "timeless love story." But I just couldn't get into it. There were far too many run-on sentences (a pet peeve of mine unless it's done REALLY well). The story jerked rather than flowed. There wasn't a single character that I could relate to. My mind kept wandering, and it took me much longer than it should have to read. This book will appeal to a lot of people. I'm just not one of them...
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Once again, Salman Rushdie cuts loose his verbal bombardment, leaving the reader gasping for breath, reeling from the word rush, and jumping for joy at the author's combination of wit and wisdom. Come witness the War of the Worlds, the battle for peace and power, and don't miss the blatant references to contemporary issues and public figures. It seems Rushdie wants the reader to be a child who is terrified and then soothed by a fairy tale. Perhaps he even wants the reader to step back, breathe deeply, and get some perspective on the events on our planet, our priorities, and our problems. A magnificent fairy tale for the erudite.
  • Rating: 5 out of 5 stars
    5/5
    It's a chronicle of a war that was lead 1000 years ago. It is a love story. It is a chronicle of our times. It is the story of the last time when the Fairy world touched ours. It is a story about language and stories. It is a story about the war between faith and reason. It is a story about humanity. It is none of these and it is all of them. Rushdie's narrator lives 1000 years in the future although we do not know that from the beginning. Neither we know that it is a war story. Rushdie weaves the tale slowly, the same way as Scheherazade waved hers (and in case the title does not point to the direct connection, the title when calculated in nights is actually 1001 nights - a number that turns out to be of importance in the world of myth... which may just be our world). The story opens 800 years in our past to show us the love story that starts it all and that leads to humanity changing and being able to tell the story so many centuries later. A jinnia (a female jinn) falls in love (despite her kind not usually being able to fall in love) and marries a philosopher. A brood of children follow and then the man abandons her - and then after she returns back to her own realm, the doors between the worlds are closed. Until our time. A freaky storm brings an age of strangenesses. A time in which people with lobeless ears seem to start getting weird powers and the laws of physics seems to start bending and changing. A baby that is better than any lie-detector in the world; a comics writer that ends up with the powers of his invented character, a gardener that walks on air (and cannot switch it off so it becomes troublesome), a woman that can throw thunderbolts from her hands and so on and so on. The fantastical seems to be bleeding into the reality and the boundary flickers and changes. And then the dark jinns, the great Ifrits decide to come to Earth. And our Princess Dunia (for the jinnia that started all this turns out to be a powerful princess) needs to start a war. Add a pair of dead philosophers (one of them the one that started all that all those centuries before) and things start to take shape. Rushdie never uses real names for places and countries (except for the ones that are needed for the story like Spain and New York) but it is not hard to recognize which lands are hiding under the initials; neither it is hard to see the nowadays events being recasted and reexplained in the reality of that world. It is as much a story of our world as it is of the imaginary one created from the author; the war on terrorism and the war that Dunia leads are the same - as are the actions of everyone involved. It is a contemporary novel wrapped into the fantastic; a legend showing the reality we all live in. The great literature of the world and the myths of the East are used to add another dimension to the story. And by the end of the novel you still remember places and phrases and sentences that opened a door to another place and time and makes you want to read more - both from the novel and from the works it uses for references or in passing. It a marvelous novel - a Chinese box of stories inside stories that never end and just give birth to new stories. It's a novel that will hold different message to every reader - based on what they had read and learned - and that has the ability to shift and change and add new meanings when you concentrate on different parts. Highly recommended!
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    I don't know why this one was so hard for me to review. Rushdie has written a lyrical and poetic tale that is supposed to be a spin on 1001 nights. It is about a storm in the approximate-now (a little in the future) that resulted in 1001 nights of "strangenesses," a near-millennium long debate between two philosophers that began in the far past and continued into the time of the strangenesses, and a historical account of the narrators' ancestors, who began with one of the philosophers and continued into the 1001 nights of strangenesses. So right, that doesn't clear it up. It's about a jinni who falls in love with a philosopher in the past, who allows him to mistreat her and refuse to marry her and give all of her children (with him) his legitimate name, and who passes back into her own world for nearly a thousand years, while their children have children and so on until there are many descendants all over the world and we are in the approximate-now. It is then about a re-awakening of the philosopher and his philosophical nemesis and their continued intellectual debate which turns into a physical war, apparently between the jinn and the humans but, at its heart, between the two philosophies. It then becomes about the war and the strangenesses that are indicative of that time when the jinn sought to take control and the humans, many descendants of the jinni-who-fell-in-love and her philosopher, who fought back. And it is all told as a history, from the perspective of the future (near-1000 years in the future) descendants of the descendants.Maybe that's why it's been so hard to review... it's much to wrap your head around. It is interesting and it is pretty and it is thought-provoking. It is romantic and harsh and philosophical. It is historical and analytical and distant. It is so many things (in not that many pages!), and it is a dense, thoughtful read. And it is enjoyable, but not fun. It is fulfilling in many ways, but not complete. Its focus is broad - covering millennia - and yet it is almost only about 1 person (the jinni who fell in love with a human). And it is even funny. Rushdie throws in a lot of repetition about the obsession of the jinn (sex) that, in lesser hands would have been infuriating but was, instead, point-making and amusing. I really appreciated a lot about the book. I liked Rushdie's story and imagination and his take on the 1001 nights.What weren't so great to me were the pace and the fact that it seemed a bit unfocused. I would have liked the book to be a little more intentional about being 1 thing or another. I would have loved Rushdie's take on the fantastical or Rushdie's romance and philosophy or Rushdie's political waxing as a historical tome... but attempting all 3 at once ended up feeling a bit slow and cumbersome. It also felt a bit unfocused... I'm not sure why - it's not simply the time-period or the variety of characters that are covered - I think it was the constant shift in perspective, perhaps without enough of a shift in perspective. Maybe there was too much sameness with all the differences. I'm not sure, but it felt, to me, a little unfocused and a little belabored.Nevertheless, I am very glad to have read this. I am looking forward to more Rushdie. I would definitely recommend to Rushdie fans. I would also recommend to those interested in a philosophical evaluation of our time with some fantasy thrown in for good measure. But I'm not sure I would recommend to someone looking for a quick fun magic-realism tale - this one takes on a more serious tone and pace. All in all, THREE AND A HALF of 5 stars.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    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.
  • Rating: 3 out of 5 stars
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Rushdie's book is an entertaining take on mythology in the modern world. The writing demonstrates strong architecture within the plot that incorporates beautiful use of themes, humor, and cycles of time (all the significant events last two years eight months and twenty eight nights). What happens when the veil between two worlds becomes thin enough for magical and mortal beings to mix together and create a hybrid race? Over the course of generations, the roots in magic remain imbedded (although undiscovered) as the forces of good and evil battle.This is a contemporary urban fantasy written with humor reminiscent of Michael Chabon. The story shows the cosmological development of conflict over a long period of time, while at the same time studying human frailty and the capacity to love.
  • Rating: 1 out of 5 stars
    1/5
    Nope, nope, nope. I cannot abide books that consist of long, rambling run-on sentences that pontificate, elaborate redundantly, and butcher the English language to the point where it screams out in pain. (See what I did there?) This book is not for me. I got 12 pages into it before I realized I was about to fling my book into the fish tank, which would be an unpleasant experience for both myself and the poor fish. I'm sure someone else can elucidate on the book's better qualities, someone able to overlook the run-ons, but it won't be me.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    Once again, I've left it too long between the reading of a book and the writing of my thoughts. Blame it on summer days, or 1,001 other reasons.Rushdie's novel is set in a New York City of some time in the future. (How far in the future becomes rather uncertain, as at points in the novel, our time period is referred to as if we are ancestors, but the world seems relatively unchanged in the interim-- could be 200 years, could be next week.) Strange things are happening: a gardener finds his feet no longer touch the ground; an abandoned baby can identify the corrupt, which is problematic as she was left at the mayor's office and adopted by the mayor. A child falls on the railroad track and the rails melt like ice cream, so she is able to be rescued. An artist's work becomes real. There's a weird firestorm, and the world seems to be coming unhinged.It all stems, according to Mr Rushdie, from the union centuries ago, of Dunia, a Jinn princess and a human. She slipped between the cracks of reality from her world to ours, fell in love, and produced scads of children with her mortal husband, the descendants of whom scattered around the world and are at the center of this firestorm battle of dark and light.Though the book seems to be billed as magical realism, I think there's a heavy element of fantasy (after all, there are Jinn) and even urban fantasy (Jinn and their offspring living in NYC) as well. The story was periodically captivating, and alternatively less so, but ultimately worth the read for me. The backstory of the two lovers, and the world Rushdie created for the Jinn was fun. And I really liked the character of Mr Geronimo, the gardener. I also found new words to use for furious and frequent copulation (which apparently is a big part of Jinn existence), that maybe, some day, I can slip into a sentence. But it may be two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights (add it up, folks, and you'll find the link to Scheherazade and the story-telling in the book) to do so.Many thanks to Library-Thing and the Publishers for sending this book my way.Tags: advanced-reader-copy, early-review-librarything, an-author-i-read, made-me-look-something-up, magical-realism, fantasy, read-in-2015, taught-me-something, urban-fantasy, vampires-ghosts-and-other-creatures
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    4/5
    The plot of Two Years, etc, could be that of a superhero comic - a powerful jinnia who has loved a human mortal returns to Earth to battle bad jinns, and the fate of several lesser POV humans, not to mention the whole planet (which is to say, New York City), hangs in the balance. But what makes this worth reading, what a comic couldn't provide, is Rushdie's lush and sly prose. The core plot is short, but Rushdie's descriptions of the characters, and the innumerable tangents and asides, are their own reward, chock full of deadpan allusions to pop and high culture. For example, in one passage, the narrator notes a slew of surreal-sounding events taking place around the world, thanks to the influence of jinns. All are references to classic works of 19th and 20th century literature (Gogol), art (Magritte), and film (Buniel), presented with enough detail to catch your attention if you already know those works, but without any tipoff if you don't.Also, the book is terrific satire. The narrator tells the story from a thousand years in the future; virtually every time the narrator calls attention to this fact, it is a sign that Rushdie is laying on the satiric mode extra-thick. Repeatedly, recent real-world events are referenced as example of the chaos unleashed by bad jinns, acting as the forces of unreason - a running commentary on the impacts of patriarchy and obscurantism in our world. The treatment of sexual desire, important as a plot point, is also an extended joke, a satire on our modern tropes of romantic love. At a key point, the narrator apologizes for offending the reader's c.3000 sensibilities by describing violent combat - this after pages of graphic disaster porn that make the apology ludicrous. The original 1001 Nights uses a nesting structure, stories within stories; Two Years relies on nested meanings - not what the characters say, or even what the narrator says about what the characters are saying, but what Rushdie, by positioning the narrator against details in the story, is implicitly saying about both. To close, here's one of my favorite passages from the story: "At the beginning of all love, there is a private treaty each of the lovers makes with himself or herself, an agreement to set aside what is wrong with the other for the sake of what is right. Love is spring after winter. It comes to heal life's wounds, inflicted by the unloving cold. When that warmth is born in the heart the imperfections of the beloved are as nothing, less than nothing, and the secret treaty with oneself is easy to sign. The voice of doubt is stilled. Later, when love fades, the secret treaty looks like folly, but if so, it's a necessary folly, born of the lovers' belief in beauty, which is to say, in the possibility of the impossible thing."
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    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.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    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.
  • Rating: 4 out of 5 stars
    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.
  • Rating: 2 out of 5 stars
    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.