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

cannot argue with the writing, or the material and ideas that he presents -- lots of philosophical and metaphorical discussions -- lots of fun -- but it digresses often, and I didn't get very connected to any of the characters -- found myself skipping pages to get to the point of a chapter after a while. my husband read it also, and found himself doing the same thing.

TYEMTN has all the makings of a Rushdie classic: an epic tale of love, humor, and violence peopled by characters both mythical and mortal. This time Rushdie concerns himself with an apocalyptic good v. evil battle between the great jinn for earth.

If you've never read Rushdie, you'll either love or hate his luscious, florid prose, the countless but memorable rabble of characters, and his satirical brand of magical realism. Midnight's Children and Satanic Verses are favorites of mine, so I dropped everything to read Rushdie's latest.

The premise: Dunia, an earlobeless jinnia takes the form of a human girl and falls in love with doctor Ibn Rushd, rather, a philosopher who cannot say he is a philosopher because he has been exiled for heresy to the small Spanish town of Lucena. In the first few pages Rushdie has already involved politics, magic, love, satire and a hint of deceit, as Dunia does not reveal to Ibn that she is a jinnia as she begins to birth him great litters of children in their two years together. So far so good, everything I love about a Rushdie novel.

When Ibn dies, Dunia returns to the upper world of the jinn, and the slits between the two worlds close for several millennia. When they finally reopen, evil jinn rush in to wreak havoc on men for no particular reason I can remember other than the fun of it, and Dunia returns as well to gather her descendants together to fight them, for when she fell in love with Ibn she fell in love also with the human race.

As always, Rushdie's creativity and talent are boundless. If you like his style, you'll like it just as much when you've finished TYEMTN, which also happens to be politically relevant, philosophically evocative, and allegorically confusing but enjoyable

Disappointments for me: TYEMTN doesn't span many generations as some of his other novels have, and is not the saga I hoped it would be. The action is devoted only to the first brief story of Ibn and Dunia's two years together, and the years of the end-of-times battle for the fate of mankind. Despite the greater allotment of space, his main characters still fail to come alive for me as much as his characters in other novels have. TYEMTN is infested with literary flourish as all his novels are, but unlike Midnight's Children in which his volubility is devoted to the years of his character's lives and the delicious minutia of their reality (snake charmers, spittoons, and good chutney, oh my!), his comma-ridden paragraphs are now devoted to describing the same idea, philosophy, or feeling, in about ten different ways before moving onto the next actual plot event.

Allegory consumed Rushdie's narrative (as he surely intended), but this overuse of allegorical layering leaves the book fragmented, keeps it from being pinned down, gives it the effect of the smoke of the jinnia's true form or the weightless airiness of Mr. Geronimo's gravitational affliction, that is, not substantial enough to stick with you, nor to make you full.

This is my first experience with Rushdie--a mistake to choose this one instead of, say, Midnight's Children. Two Years is full of humor and philosophy and understanding of the human condition, with even a not-too-thinlythinly disguised riff on The Donald. But the book was essentially boring. I had to make myself finish it.

This book is highly enjoyable. It is very much in the realm of fantasy so if that is not your genre I would stay away from this. The story gets five stars hence my rating.
The production of this book I have a few gripes with. This books dust cover is really really thin, it is paper thin and gets damaged the moment you put it in a back back or anywhere where it will catch. Most dust jackets should at least add some protection to your book but this one just doesn't add any real protection. Also the gloss on the dust jackets leaves all kinds of finger prints on the jacket which aesthetically just doesn't look nice. I would usually never put this stuff in a review of a book but the book I received also had a page that was sewn in incorrectly or cut incorrectly. In the middle of my book there is one page that is angled and sticks out from the bottom so that if set down the page would actually touch the whatever the surface is. Partnering this with the weird dust jacket choice I just think maybe the production of the book I received was not a five star rating.
This story was good enough for me to completely overlook these things, this is my kind of story so a five star rating is what this book deserves in my opinion. But was less happy about the quality of the product I received which is disappointing but not a deal breaker for me.

In his best books, Rushdie's prose is engaging, lyrical, evocative of time and place, and most importantly funny. This story has none of that. Worse, it is slow and it does not draw you into the world he is trying to create. It reads like a turgid BBC news story of the "strangenesses" with a dose of philosophy tossed into the mix.

I have to start this review by admitting that TWO YEARS EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS was my first Salman Rushdie novel. For years I’ve heard terrific things about his mastery of magical realism and gift for beautiful sentences, and in these respects, his new book certainly does not disappoint. Set in the near future, the story begins after a horrific storm strikes New York City, ripping the veil between our world and the world of the spirits, and triggering a war between good and evil. The wordy title refers to the length of time of the war --- 1,001 nights, also a reference to classic Arab mythology.

From the very beginning of TWO YEARS EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS, Rushdie draws the reader in with lush, romantic prose describing the love affair between Dunia, a jinn princess, and Ibn Rushd, a doctor and man of reason. Rushdie explains that although jinni are known to be capricious, whimsical and even devilish, Dunia is drawn to intelligent men and renounces her jinn powers to live as a mortal with Ibn. Supernaturally lascivious, Dunia bears three sets of children, giving Ibn well over 20 children. Though he is certainly intelligent, Ibn remains ignorant of Dunia’s supernatural background, even as it becomes clear that his children have been born from a nonhuman mother. He ignores the children and eventually leaves Dunia for work, breaking her heart. Despite her pain, she vows to love him forever and forgive him when the time comes.

Over the years that follow, Dunia’s children spread out and have kids of their own, passing her mythical genes onto thousands of descendants. With time, Dunia and her gifts are forgotten, and her children’s magical powers go dormant. That is, of course, until a massive storm rips the thin veil separating our world from the world of the jinn. Overnight, unremarkable humans begin to find themselves capable of incredible feats of magic, from levitation to identifying corruption, and drawing superheroes that come to life. As these characters begin to deal with their newfound powers, Rushdie’s wit brings his magical creations to life, especially with Geronimo, a practical gardener who cannot stop levitating.

With several humans now exhibiting purely supernatural powers, it becomes clear that the jinn are back. Dunia, her human lover and his philosophical enemy reawaken, revisiting a centuries-old debate about science and faith. With a war brewing between the evil jinn and the good descendants of Dunia, their debate becomes physical, adding a new level to the war. As the air becomes tense, the humans prepare to fight the jinn who would seek to take control of humanity. With Dunia’s guidance, her children fight to save the world. Though the plot is, at its most skeletal, a simple story of superheroes fighting against evil, Rushdie adds such depth to his narrative that it feels new. With his wry humor, even the worst fights become funny, as humans and their supernatural counterparts fight and die in surprising ways.

Rushdie’s tongue-in-cheek references to current political, religious and social issues are subtle but profoundly thought-provoking. His characters, though inventive, highlight the war between religion and reason. Given his own political history, it is easy to see which side he falls on, and yet the book does not feel as political as one may expect, perhaps because of his fine mastery of satire. Speaking in the third person, Rushdie allows himself the space to discuss everything from philosophy to religion and even literature with an even-handed, affectionate teasing. At times this space can be a bit overwhelming, as the reader is being told not only a story, but also the history of that story as relayed to us 1,000 years into the future. The book could have benefited from a bit more editing, as Rushdie’s sentences can become dreadfully wordy and unclear. I often found myself rereading sentences several times over --- though this was not always upsetting, as he does some beautiful, truly impressive things with only 26 letters.

For a first foray into Rushdie’s work, I found TWO YEARS EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS highly enjoyable, though definitely a commitment.

Reviewed by Rebecca Munro

I have to start this review by admitting that TWO YEARS EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS was my first Salman Rushdie novel. For years I’ve heard terrific things about his mastery of magical realism and gift for beautiful sentences, and in these respects, his new book certainly does not disappoint. Set in the near future, the story begins after a horrific storm strikes New York City, ripping the veil between our world and the world of the spirits, and triggering a war between good and evil. The wordy title refers to the length of time of the war --- 1,001 nights, also a reference to classic Arab mythology.

From the very beginning of TWO YEARS EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS, Rushdie draws the reader in with lush, romantic prose describing the love affair between Dunia, a jinn princess, and Ibn Rushd, a doctor and man of reason. Rushdie explains that although jinni are known to be capricious, whimsical and even devilish, Dunia is drawn to intelligent men and renounces her jinn powers to live as a mortal with Ibn. Supernaturally lascivious, Dunia bears three sets of children, giving Ibn well over 20 children. Though he is certainly intelligent, Ibn remains ignorant of Dunia’s supernatural background, even as it becomes clear that his children have been born from a nonhuman mother. He ignores the children and eventually leaves Dunia for work, breaking her heart. Despite her pain, she vows to love him forever and forgive him when the time comes.

Over the years that follow, Dunia’s children spread out and have kids of their own, passing her mythical genes onto thousands of descendants. With time, Dunia and her gifts are forgotten, and her children’s magical powers go dormant. That is, of course, until a massive storm rips the thin veil separating our world from the world of the jinn. Overnight, unremarkable humans begin to find themselves capable of incredible feats of magic, from levitation to identifying corruption, and drawing superheroes that come to life. As these characters begin to deal with their newfound powers, Rushdie’s wit brings his magical creations to life, especially with Geronimo, a practical gardener who cannot stop levitating.

With several humans now exhibiting purely supernatural powers, it becomes clear that the jinn are back. Dunia, her human lover and his philosophical enemy reawaken, revisiting a centuries-old debate about science and faith. With a war brewing between the evil jinn and the good descendants of Dunia, their debate becomes physical, adding a new level to the war. As the air becomes tense, the humans prepare to fight the jinn who would seek to take control of humanity. With Dunia’s guidance, her children fight to save the world. Though the plot is, at its most skeletal, a simple story of superheroes fighting against evil, Rushdie adds such depth to his narrative that it feels new. With his wry humor, even the worst fights become funny, as humans and their supernatural counterparts fight and die in surprising ways.

Rushdie’s tongue-in-cheek references to current political, religious and social issues are subtle but profoundly thought-provoking. His characters, though inventive, highlight the war between religion and reason. Given his own political history, it is easy to see which side he falls on, and yet the book does not feel as political as one may expect, perhaps because of his fine mastery of satire. Speaking in the third person, Rushdie allows himself the space to discuss everything from philosophy to religion and even literature with an even-handed, affectionate teasing. At times this space can be a bit overwhelming, as the reader is being told not only a story, but also the history of that story as relayed to us 1,000 years into the future. The book could have benefited from a bit more editing, as Rushdie’s sentences can become dreadfully wordy and unclear. I often found myself rereading sentences several times over --- though this was not always upsetting, as he does some beautiful, truly impressive things with only 26 letters.

For a first foray into Rushdie’s work, I found TWO YEARS EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS highly enjoyable, though definitely a commitment.

Reviewed by Rebecca Munro

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 the store review), he had stressed the importance of the Imagination, but in this book his imagination has really run away with him.

What if we have never understood the basic underpinnings of our world and what causes events to happen? What if we're really descendents of the jinn, or as the Western world calls them, genies? This is the premise of Two Years Eight Months And Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie.

The title is not just a whim of the author. It is the time it takes to reach a thousand and one nights, which is one of the most enduring legends of all time, how a woman outsmarted a cruel despot and saved herself by telling him stories for all those nights yet leaving him each night with a cliffhanger so that he always wanted to hear more.

Long ago, the jinn moved freely between Earth and their own land, having little interaction with humans and caring little for them. Occasionally one was entrapped and if rescued by a human, granted him wishes but overall there was separation between the two races. Everything changed when Dunia, a female jinn and daughter of the mighty emperor, came to Earth and fell in love with a philosopher and married him. Their descendants populated the world over the thousands of years after this event. Dunia went back to the jinn land and the portal between the worlds closed.

Then the time of strangeness occurred. The portal opened and the jinn were free to come to Earth. Four jinn who hated the humans and were Dunia's enemies came through and in a war with her, created mayhem on the land. They used humans to spread their hate and cruelty and from this terrorism was born. Dunia's descendants fought against the evil jinn for dominance of the land.

Salman Rushdie is my favorite novelist and this novel did not disappoint. It is a lyrical, bawdy, wide-ranging story that explores themes such as the endurance of love, the underpinnings of evil, the positive side of being different and the power of story and language. It ranges across centuries and exposes readers to a new way of experiencing the world. This book is recommended for readers of literary fiction.

In this novel Salman Rushdie brings together the mythologies of works such as "Arabian Nights" with contemporary American creations such as Graphic novels. He is a writer who lived and wrote with the oppression of a death threat because of a specific novel, described in detail in "Joseph Anton". Here he continues to celebrate the freedoms of literature, no matter the political situation. The conflict in the novel is, in case you missed when it happened, the Great Djinn War (or perhaps Wars - human vs Djinn as well as Djinn vs Djinn). However, contemporary religous struggles are not ignored. With a pointed examination of the construction of divinity, Rushdie has one of the Djinn there's only one word that justifies that as far as these savages are concerned: the word of this or that god. In the name of a divine entity we can do whatever the hell we like and most of those fools down there will swallow it." During this apocalyptic struggle, Rushdie sustains his post-modern slant: "It seemed that digression was the true principle of the universe, that the only real subject was the way the subject kept changing." And he sustains his wry sense of humor. Given the heavy testing Salman Rushdie has had to endure to write freely, this novel felt like a weight had been lifted from the author's shoulders. He has always utilized elements of cultures from the world. In "The Ground Beneath her Feet", he explored what if popular musicians from India became as large world-wide as Michael Jackson. In this work, elements of the graphic novel become entangled in a world-wide power struggle, and it is somehow fun. Toni Morrison praised Rushdie as a true international writer for the world. His position is unique, yet he contines to create that unique position with works such as this one.

Two years, eight months and 28 nights is one thousand nights and one night. Blending magic and myth, science fiction and fantasy, superhero comic books and classic literature, Salman Rushdie tells us the story of the Two Worlds' War from a perspective of a narrator who lives in a better time, about a thousand and one years from now. The story begins, however, in the distant past.

Dunia, also known as the Lightning Princess, is a jinni. In the twelfth century, Dunia took a human lover named Ibn Rushd, a philosopher-writer-storyteller. She has a thing for philosophers, having also known Aristotle and Plato, but she fell in love with Rushd.

As a philosopher, Rushd is not entirely successful. He considers himself defeated by the philosopher Ghazili, who died before Rushd was born. Ghazili jeered at philosophy because, to his mind, logic and reason have no role in a Universe that is ruled by God's will. Rushd believes in logic and science and even in God but not in religion because "the godly are God's worst advocates." Challenging accepted interpretations of the Qu'ran has caused some trouble for Rushd (including book-burnings and exile) until a Caliph deems him "rehabilitated." Salman Rushdie is plainly having some fun using Rushd as his alter-ego. Rushdie's concerns with religious intolerance (as well as other forms of intolerance) resurface frequently in the story.

Rushd is not good to Dunia or his family. The bastard children he ignores eventually have progeny who disperse to all corners of the globe, including North America, where the story resumes 800 years later. The story sometimes circles back to Rushd who, experiencing a post-death epiphany, enlists Dunia's help to "reunite their scattered family and help it right the coming world cataclysm." It is that quest that animates the book's plot. Dunia's task includes avenging treachery by dark princes of the jinn while fending off a jinn invasion (easier than it sounds, since many jinn are too lazy or horny to bother making the journey through the wormhole).

Dunia's descendants are mostly notable for the absence of earlobes until Dunia awakens their powers. Key characters include Geronimo Manezes (a gardener who is afflicted with a worsening case of levitation, a condition he equates with "a previously unknown virus: a gravity bug"); a baby who exposes corrupt politicians; Teresa Saca, a young woman who electrocutes men with lighting from her fingertips; and Jinendra "Jimmy" Kapoor, a young artist who seems to bring his Indian superhero to life before learning that a "dark jinni" has been unleashed on the world.

The stories that Scheherazade told taught lessons. I'm not sure that Rushdie's updated version teaches lessons so much as it satirizes the lessons that others teach. Rushdie lampoons philosophy and its "more tedious cousin" theology, particularly the notions that "only fear will move sinful Man towards God" and the countervailing view that "with the passage of time human beings will turn from faith to reason, in spite of all the inadequacies of the rational mind." Perhaps one lesson to take from the novel is Rushdie's observation that modern life moves so quickly that we have forgotten the pleasure of lingering (and no longer have the attention spans that slowly unfolding pleasures command). Another might lie in a character's realization that the illusion of reality is preferable to a known fantasy. And another is that using fear (of government or God) to control behavior is bound to lead to oppression. And another: "rage destroys the enraged." Of course, the virtue of tolerance and of preserving free thought by separating church and state is always a good lesson.

If the lessons are a bit heavy-handed, if some of Rusdie's targets are easy, that seems a natural product of satire. While satire is fun, it also makes the story seem less substantial. My only other quarrel with Two Years is that some moments in the story are a bit too silly, but those moments are few.

Well into the novel, a character from the future explains that "to tell a story about the past is to tell a story about the present" and "to recount a fantasy" is to recount "a tale about the actual." Stories from the past, including myths, help us explore how we got there from here. I'm not sure Rushdie's novel accomplishes those goals, but the story is entertaining and, not surprisingly, it is enlivened by Rushdie's rich prose. I would give Two Years 4 1/2 stars if I could.

A sad thing can happen to some multi-"Booker Prize winning" and "Universally acclaimed" authors at the end of a long career. They may lose that driving edge that keeps their readers enthralled.
This is a take off on "One thousand and One nights" and tackles the mythology of the jinn, those whimsical evil spirits that are so annoying they invariably end up trapped in bottles for their own good until some unsuspecting fool releases them. In this case the entire jinn world comes through the portal, stoked for war, and thunderbolts fly as they make what might very well be their last stand.
The novel opens in ancient Spain, setting the hook as two revered philosophers feud about God and agnosticism; one posthumously (don't ask!). The action soon moves to contemporary New York City, and the battle between the jinns and the rest of humanity begins in earnest.
The book is, as expected, extremely well written. Rushdie has not lost his style, a mix of impeccable if sometimes archaic English, and of Mumbanglish, the way they speak in Mumbai. Even though it is New York, the two human characters of any consequence are both from India. There are some interesting bits, a good deal about comic books, and a few myths and legends about the netherworld. But for the most part this seems like a romp, a fanciful and boisterous interlude, with no real meat, no design, nothing to take away, like a quickly digested meal that leaves you hungry a half hour after eating.
Mr. Rushdie may be just coasting, but I sure hope he's saving his energy for something better to come.

A “colossal fragmentation of reality” occurred in the 20th century, Salman Rushdie has said, and his novels enact and display that fragmentation with terror and glee. His new book assures us that reality has lately been crumbling more colossally than ever, and is about to come completely unglued. The climate destabilization we are experiencing is only a foretaste of advancing chaos, which the author describes with considerable relish. Eschatological lightning strikes, oracular infants and local failures of gravity will become the norm, as the Dark Ifrits, the mischievous forces of disorder, begin to take advantage of the weakening of the fabric of the everyday.
The cumbersome title transcribes a certain number of days into years and months, but not the four weeks that would naturally complete it, because the word “Nights” is needed to suggest the original Thousand and One. Rushdie is our Scheherazade, inexhaustibly enfolding story within story and unfolding tale after tale with such irrepressible delight that it comes as a shock to remember that, like her, he has lived the life of a storyteller in immediate peril. Scheherazade told her 1,001 tales to put off a stupid, cruel threat of death; Rushdie found himself under similar threat for telling an unwelcome tale. So far, like her, he has succeeded in escaping. May he continue to do so.
At the idea of trying to summarize the plot, I scream and fall back fainting on my therapist's couch. Rushdie has a complex imagination: plot buds from plot, endlessly. There are at least 1,001 stories and sub stories, and nearly as many characters. All you need to know is that they’re mostly highly entertaining, amusing and ingenious. A good many of the characters are in fact genies. The jinn live in their own world, Peristan. But the dilapidation of reality in our world, intensifying since the second millennium, has affected the wall between us and Peristan, leaving slots and slits through which they can slip.
Their existence in Peristan is one of almost ceaseless sexual intercourse in surroundings of total luxury. Still, some of them find this as boring as some of us might, and like to sneak over here to entertain themselves by meddling with our little mortal lives. The male jinn are creatures of flame, the female jinnia of smoke. They have great powers of magic, not so great powers of intellect. Wilful, impulsive and unwise, one of them gets trapped over here every now and then, imprisoned by a spell in a bottle or a lamp.
We haven’t seen any jinn for a while because their passages into our world were sealed up about a thousand years ago, not long after the greatest jinnia princess, Dunia, had a love affair in Andalucia with the philosopher Ibn Rushd (also known as the great Aristotelian philosopher Averroes). The outcome of this affair was a slew of descendants distinguished by their lobeless ears and trace of fairy blood. For that’s what Peristan is in English – Fairyland.
The main plot is built around a philosophical feud between the rationalist Ibn Rushd and the pious theologian Ghazali of Iran (known and honoured as Renewer of the Faith), who placed the power of God above all earthly causes and effects. Ibn Rushd tried to reconcile reason and humane morality with God and faith, positing a kindly God and an unfanatic faith. He challenged Ghazali. His reward was disgrace and exile.
The choices are presented simplistically, comic-book style, as absolute Good and Evil. The agonies are presented, disaster-movie style, as catastrophes so awful that readers who don’t want to think about them can shrug them off. Rushdie is a generous, good-natured writer who’d rather woo and seduce his readers than reduce the truth to gall and brimstone and make them swallow it. All the same, the book jacket is the Goya engraving that stands at the very entrance of the modern age: The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. The monsters here engendered, however playfully imagined, are not imaginary.
The central character of Rushdie’s new novel, “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights” is also a man who has been cursed and then gets blamed for it. Geronimo Manezes, a Mumbai-born gardener now living in New York, has begun to levitate. This isn’t the wish fulfillment of a flying dream; it threatens his livelihood and brings the increasing hostility of strangers. “Why do you imagine I consider my condition an improvement? he wanted to cry out. Why, when it has ­ruined my life and I fear it may bring about my early death?”
But Geronimo’s predicament is not an isolated case. It foreshadows an era of “strange nesses,” where the “laws which had long been accepted as the governing principles of reality had collapsed.” The strange nesses — some meteorological, some natural disasters, some simply miraculous — are the prelude to a full-blown invasion of the human world by malevolent spirits from another dimension.
It turns out that four evil jinn, Zabardast, Zumurrud, Ra’im Blood-Drinker and Shining Ruby, have broken through the wormholes separating the world from Fairyland and are bent on causing havoc in the 21st century. The only power that can stop them is a nice female jinnia called Dunia and her human descendants: Geronimo Manezes, the British composer Hugo Casterbridge, the young Indian-American graphic novelist Jimmy Kapoor and a femme fatale called Teresa Saca. If Dunia can gather them up in time and awaken them to the power of their jinni nature, humanity might have a chance against the forces of darkness. “The seals between the Two Worlds are broken and the dark jinn ride,” she tells Geronimo. “Your world is in danger and because my children are everywhere I am protecting it. I’m bringing them together, and together we will fight back.” Well, the reader feels, it’s a long shot, but it might just work.
“The battle against the jinn was a portrait of the battle within the human heart, which meant that the jinn were somehow abstractions as well as realities, and that their descent to the lower world served to show that world what had to be eradicated within itself, which was unreason itself.” The book’s title is a nod to “One Thousand and One Nights,” but this kind of overt commentary is a long way from the ­authorless and economy of fairy tales, which never lecture and whose bareness — envious stepmother, noble prince, dark forest — extends a more subtle invitation to the reader.
Towards the end of the book, we find that our descendants of the next millennium have abandoned conflict as a way of life. They peacefully cultivate their gardens rather than their bigotries and hatreds, having found that “in the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged”. But … Of course there has to be a but.
Contemporary sophistication declares that peace is boring, moderation is blah, happy is sappy. Defying sophistry, Rushdie imagines a contented people, but only by depriving them of dreams. No visions, no nightmares. Their sleep is empty darkness. The implication is that our human gift of imagining can’t exist without the hatred, anger and aggressiveness that lead to such human behaviors as warfare, conscious cruelty and deliberate destruction. To imply that only our dark jinn inside can give us dreams and visions may be one way of admitting the essential balance between the creative and the destructive within us.
But it’s also, I think, a capitulation to the idea, so powerful in 20th-century literature, that the slow processes of creation are less interesting, less real, than the cataclysmic dramas of destruction. And this leaves us right back where we are now. If cultivating our garden stultifies our minds, if using reason prevents our seeing visions, if compassion enfeebles us – what then? Back to conflict as our default solution? Cultivate hatred, anger, violence, reinstate the priests, politicians and warmakers, and finish destroying the Earth?
I wish we could abandon this false opposition, which neglects the possibility of more imaginative uses of both the light and the darkness in us. But I like to think how many readers are going to admire the courage of this book, revel in its fierce colors, its boisterousness, humor and tremendous pizzazz, and take delight in its generosity of spirit.

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.

I approached reading Salman Rushdie's twelfth novel with both curiosity and trepidation.

Having read the controversial author's The Satanic Verses, I was prepared for Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights to be a heavy read, and it is.

The story begins with great promise, telling the tale of the legendary, but all too real, jinn, or genies, and their interactions with humans.

The female jinni at the heart of the story, Dania, falls in love with a human and they produce offspring who possess no earlobes.

The tale follows random members of Dania's tall family tree, few of whom are aware of their being partly not of this world.

Odd happenings take place throughout the novel.

A man named Geronimo begins levitating, his feet inches above the ground at all times.

A young graphic novelist, Jimmy, sees a jinn put on the mask of one of his superhero creations.

People are struck by lightning; slits reopen between worlds, enabling the jinn to return to earth; chaos ensues.

While interesting, the story does become muddled, introducing multiple jinn who are virtually impossible to differentiate, as well as a large number of humans connected to Dania.

I wanted to love Rushdie's book, based loosely on the Arabian Nights, as the title's numbers equal roughly 1001 nights, but I found myself confused and bored a little more than halfway through the tale.

I was unable to make and then remember the connections between human and jinn characters.

The "strangenesses" that occur throughout Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights seem to happen during 1001 day cycles.

However, I cannot be sure.

The final verdict is that Rushdie's latest work has much potential, but eventually sinks into trifling boredom.

This book was somewhat of a disappointment to me. I am a huge fan of Rushdie, but this book seemed like the magical realism and topical elements of Neil Gaiman in American Gods and the cultural fabric of modern life, culture, and its stresses presented by Haruki Murakami. In all, I felt that this was a somewhat contrived story that borrowed heavily from these two authors - the only difference being the eastern and historical spice and tremendous writing presented by Rushdie - almost as if it is Rushdie’s homage to these two authors who have found success in these avenues.

Rushdie is an incredible writer, and the ways in which he approaches his work and the world that he presents is unique. That is why I was surprised that in this piece I just found a lot of it to be done before - what is most closely American Gods but in the far east over centuries. Furthermore, I felt the writing to be a lot of tell and not show, and pop culture name dropping for a reason I am quite aware of, but was just over done. The writing is complicated and masterful, but the showing and not telling seemed to be distracting and made the text fly by very quickly and not necessarily in a good way.

Of course, his goal was to make it sound like it is from the oral tradition, but I found the result is that the writing managed to make TWO YEARS flat and not of the caliber I am used to from Rushdie. That is perhaps my biggest complaint – this book was okay, but it was not as excellent as the experience I normally get. Another goal is that it appears that the ideas of culture, stories, and the resulting world that we live in being the result of a variety of jinns incorporation into our humanistic flesh on earth – but the way it seemed to me was really just poorly executed Murakami with no substance beyond popularity and fame in the product rather than the product's meaning with the human race.

That said, there were some things I thought were great. Rushdie's writing and command over the English language continues to take my breath away, but it is the way he told the story made me bored and fly though the text. Toward the end of the book, there were some sincerely beautiful passages that discussed the creation and genesis of language, writing, racism, and war, and his philosophical approaches to its genesis, and then a connection to the text in what the jinn have to do with it.

But I wonder if there was too much filler, too much language standing in the way of a narrative. I may be so used to subtlety in my reading in terms of overall application of the big themes that Rushdie presents that I am frustrated at the shallow and direct telling of this material – as if too much stuff stands in the way of subtle appreciation... But this is definitely fantasy based on a long tradition of great eastern writing and storytelling, and that is the point...

...but in American Gods, I liked the story and the themes a great deal more. In Rushdie's other writing I liked the writing and the flavor a great deal more. In Murakami's writing, he incorporates western culture a great deal more masterfully. Simply put, I didn't particularly care for this bedtime story. Rather than comfortably dozing off in my covers as the tale is whispered to me, I wanted to stay up past my bedtime and watch the movie instead.

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.

I truly wanted to like this novel, which takes it cue from the tales of 1001 Nights.

What I found though was a mash-up of forced "funny" and an allegory on the evils of religion. The jinn female protagonist Dunia's come to save and call to arms her cartoonish descendants (including a graphic book writer and his superhero brought to life). Think Robin Williams in risque opera buffa (ridicolo); not hard to picture if you recall the opening scene from "Mrs. Doubtfire" as he provided voice for the caged bird singing Figaro, Figaro, Figaro (- Rossini's Barber of Seville).

Now, morph Williams into his Jinn from Disney's animated Aladdin as he sings, "Well, Ali Baba had them forty thieves, Scheherazade had a thousand tales... See, all you gotta do is rub that lamp, and I'll say:
"Mr. Aladdin, sir, what will your pleasure be?
Let me take your order, jot it down?"
You ain't ever had friend like me!"

Rushdie's admixture of cartoon "fun" and sententious allegory with an Anti-Religion moral, peppered with digressive pedagogy tediously excoriating All religion is a fable that falls flat. TWO YEARS EIGHT MONTHS AND TWENTY-EIGHT NIGHTS is hardly funny or fun, or even that clever (as you might suspect from the elongated title).

I completely concur with his quote in the book's final chapter, “In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged,” and recognize, as the book notes, that millions have died in the name of religion. By comparison, Mr. Rushdie's conclusion that ALL religions are based on "fairy tales" is insupportable and could even be considered as intended to inflame. His atheistic message that ALL religions are harmful to society is absurd and flies in the face of solid evidence.

In the book, Rushdie tells of one of the evil jinn's ability to take the form of a lion, then goes on to graphically describe the male lion's barbed reproductive organ which tears up the female jinn's insides upon exiting.

After reading this book I can't help but think I might know how that feels.

This being my first Salman Rushdie novel, I’m not sure if what I’m about to say is something frequent readers take for granted or not.

His is the ADHD of writing styles.

This is not to say that there is not a wealth of beautiful prose and wondrous imagery that brings to life the world of jinn and magic. This is just to say that at times, his writing feels like that uncle that tells you a long rambling story dependent on knowing six of his other stories. The kind where he’ll start to tell you what happened last weekend, but halfway through, you need to hear a different story to give you background for the first story. Then halfway through that, there’s *another* story that you need to know background on *that* story. And even by the time you get back to the resolution of the first, original tale, you’ve forgotten a great deal of what happened in his setup.

Maybe my issue is with the formatting of the “chapters”; long, nearly tiresome chunks of text that my Kindle said would take an hour a piece to read through. And through this hour, we get two different characters “present-day” stories interspersed with four or more chunks of background and world building. Conventionally, there’s nothing wrong with the framing, on a large scale, but it may have been easier to follow if there were a greater feeling of flow-in, flow-out from action to exposition to worldbuilding. Separating each into chapters may have helped.

Aside from that, the world Rushdie builds is compelling, spanning millennia, and convincing from the word go. The final ‘book’ of the novel finally avoids the fractured formatting above and gets to a real solid story of conflict and resolution. Overall, it was a enjoyable, if slightly tedious read. Rushdie won’t be my next book to read, but I may circle back to another of his novels in a year or so.

[Review from an advance copy provided by NetGalley]

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.

[Disclaimer: I received an ARC of this book from the publisher for an honest and candid review. This review was originally written for LibraryThing Early Reviewers.]

Back in the 12th century, disgraced philosopher Ibn Rushd has a love affair with Dunia, who he thinks is a young woman of Jewish descent, but is actually a princess of the jinn. In these far-off days there are slits between the world of the jinn and our own world, and the jinn sometimes interfere with humanity, often wickedly, but Dunia is unusual in that she falls in love with a human and has children with him – many children, sometimes twelve or more at a time. Ibn Rushd is a highly intelligent rationalist, but manages not to notice the oddity of this. Centuries later, not far in the future from our own time, the slits between the jinn world and our own have been lost for many years and Dunia's descendants have spread throughout the world, unaware of their jinn heritage. But after a great storm lashes the world, strange things begin to happen – people finding their feet no longer touch the ground, people being struck by lightning and finding themselves afterwards possessed of strange powers, people suffering from what are either terrifying hallucinations or perhaps even more terrifying reality. It appears the jinn are back...

The story is told by the humans of the far future, a thousand years from now. As they point out, after such a length of time they can't be completely sure about the details of what happened but the tale they tell is the one that has been passed down to them over the intervening centuries. This is a wonderful device for Rushdie to look at some of the sillinesses of our own time as if from a great distance, allowing him to compress our complicated interlinked world down to a manageable size. And he ranges widely, through philosophy, politics, religion, terrorism, the importance of words, language and stories, optimism and pessimism, the disconnect of modern humanity from the planet, and so on. It's all handled very lightly, though, with a tone of affectionate mockery more than anything else. And, much to my surprise, it's deliciously funny – had me laughing aloud many times at his razor-sharp satire of many of the things we take so seriously.

Religion takes a beating. I'm new to Rushdie, but am of course aware of his history of upsetting the lunatic end of Muslim fundamentalism. But I found him quite even-handed really – he mocks all religions equally! And yet, although I believe he classes himself as an atheist, I felt quite strongly that it is formalised religion he's mocking rather than faith itself. There is an ongoing debate in the book between Ibn Rushd and Ghazali, another philosopher, (and both of them real 12th century philosophers), on whether it is ever possible to reconcile reason and faith – indeed, whether one should even try. Though for a good part of the book I felt the tone is pretty pro-reason, in the end it seems as if he pulls back a little – a suggestion that reason may win but that it might turn out to be something of a hollow victory in the end. As an atheist, the book didn't offend me – the tone is not nearly as arrogant and dismissive as the worst of the ranting atheist fringe achieves - but I suspect I might have struggled with it a bit if I were a person of faith – any faith.

However, religion aside, he has lots of fun with less contentious subjects. There's some brilliant satirising of politics, totalitarianism, world financial institutions and so on and, on a more intimate level, of love, sex, and human relationships in general. Extremely well written, with incredible long rambling sentences that wander all over the place but always manage to find their way to their proper destination in the end – although just occasionally this reader had forgotten where we were heading by the time we got there. It's really a tour de force performance, hugely entertaining while also being deeply thought-provoking. There are references to philosophers and history, but also to the various mythologies of the world, some of which I got and many more of which went flying over my head as fast as a jinn on a magic carpet. But it didn't matter – the book makes sense internally whether the reader gets the references or not – catching the odd one or two just gives that extra little glow of satisfaction. He parades his huge knowledge and intelligence blatantly, but with such warmth that the trailing reader feels caught up in his wake rather than left behind.

As to the actual story, I'm already seeing it being referred to as magical realism. Not in my opinion – this is satire masquerading as a fairy tale. There's nothing real about it on the surface – all the reality is hidden below the story, the top layer is purely magical. As with the best fairy tales, it all comes down ultimately to a battle between good and evil. The first three-quarters are deliciously light, full of intelligence but wrapped in a layer of warmth and humour. The last quarter becomes somewhat grimmer and, for me, loses a little of the magic. Rushdie's previously light touch becomes a shade more heavy-handed and the philosophising becomes a little repetitive as if to be sure his points have been made. But the dip is short and it all comes together again in a satisfying ending.

I wasn't sure whether I'd get along with the book at all, having previously started and abandoned another couple of Rushdie's books many years ago, but this one surprised and delighted me – a book that could be read on many levels and that I'm sure would reveal even more on each re-reading. I wondered all the way through whether it was deeply profound or pretentious twaddle – I suspect it may be a bit of both, but if it is pretentious twaddle then it's immensely entertaining and intelligent pretentious twaddle, and that works just as well for me as deeply profound. Perhaps I'll try some of his other stuff again... 4½ stars for me, so rounded up.

NB This book was provided for review by the publisher, Random House.

Disclaimer: I received an advanced copy of this book from netgalley (and Random House) in exchange for an honest review.

There is no question that Rushdie is a great story teller and his latest endeavor is no exception. One of the things that I love about his books is that they can be read on multiple levels. On the surface, they are entertaining stories that can be read for the sole enjoyment of the weird, wacky, and intelligently humorous ride. Yet, on a deeper level, his books are filled with symbolism, allusions, and often complicated philosophical questions that lead to a richer and more interesting reading experience.

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (or 1001 nights for the mathematically impaired) is a novel inspired by The Arabian Nights. You don’t have to have read The Arabian Nights in order to understand or enjoy this one, but having read it does make picking up references more fun. In similar structural fashion, Two Years… contains stories nested within stories connected by a central story. Humankind finds itself in the middle of a great war between the jinn (a.k.a. genies) spanning 1001 nights. Sparked by a theological debate between rationalist Ibn Rushd and Ghazali about the existence of God (truthfully, the argument is a little more complex than that), the war is a time of upheaval for the humans caught in the middle. Luckily during Ibn Rushd lifetime, Dunia (a princess of the jinn) fell in love with Ibn Rushd and spawned a ludicrous number of half-magical children and their descendants are called in to battle and save humankind from extinction.

On the surface level, it’s pure fantasy replete with flying carpets, genies, levitating humans, star-crossed love stories, and comic-book style superheroes. Yet, simmering just below the surface, this book hits close to home with regard to many current events. It doesn’t take an astute reader to quickly figure out that the story is a clear analysis of religious fundamentalism (a theme Rushdie has tackled before in other books) and the age old religion vs. science/reason debate. Two Years… tackles a variety of interesting themes including faith vs. reason, gender relations, power & control, and morality.

It is witty, intelligent, and an overall fun read that I highly recommend. Here are some quotes I enjoyed (and that don’t give away any plot lines):

"If you walk away from God you should probably try to stay in the good books of Luck"

"In American mouths “Hieronymus’ quickly became “Geronimo” and he enjoyed, he had to admit, the Indian-chiefy allusion. He was a big man like his father with big competent hands, a think neck and hawkish profile and with his Indian-Indian complexion and all, it was easy for Americans to see the Wild West in him and treat him with the respect reserved from remnants of peoples exterminated by the white man, which he accepted without clarifying that he was Indian from India and therefore familiar with a quite different history of imperialist oppression, but never mind."

"When Alice fell down the rabbit hole, it was an accident, but when she stepped through the looking glass, it was of her own free will, and a braver deed by far."

"Sister wasn’t and had never been a nun but folks called her Sister because of her religious temperament and a supposed resemblance to the actress Whoopi Goldberg. Nobody had called her C.C. since her late husband departed this life with a buxom younger person of the Latina persuasion and ended up in hell, or Albuquerque, which were just, two names for the same one place."

I loved the book for both the magical story (and nested stories within) and for the thoughtful and funny commentary underlying the story. Perfect for readers who enjoy fantasy and mythology with philosophical and analytic threads weaved into the storyline.

This is the first Salman Rushdie novel I've read, so I'm not sure how much this style pervades his other novels, so this may or may not be useful to some readers.

This absolutely defines magical realism (or urban fantasy, both could arguably work). Centuries earlier, a jinnia (which is kind of like what we think of as a genie...but basically we've got it wrong. If you read the book you'll get a very lengthy description of what jinnia really are) falls in love with a mortal man, and has dozens of children. Her descendants (all think they are normal people living normal lives until they suddenly develop strange "powers") ultimately help in the war against essentially evil powers.

First the positives. The prose is beautiful. The imagery is incredible. The language is absolutely captivating and even without a storyline, it would be easy to get lost in. It was also incredible the number of themes that run throughout - good vs. evil, questions of religions, the plight of the "different" among the masses, the everlasting and transcendent nature of love.

But I'm only giving this 3 stars. Because when it came down to it, I had a really hard time connecting to the story. At times it felt kind of rambling. You're getting somewhere in the main plotline, but then you have to hear the backstory of the jinnia, or the childhood of some obscure character, or how the jinnia grew up, and then back to the main plot. It was hard to keep track of.

Also, for me personally, I guess there was too much of both magic and realism. It made it hard to commit to either theme. I can do fantasy, but it seemed like there was too much real-life to root onto, that it made it hard to accept how these other creatures played into everyday lives. But that's just me. If you enjoy that sort of thing, then you'll probably love this book, for all the reasons listed above.

DNF @ 165 pages.... OMG! I tried and tried to finish this book but an entire month later, I have to say, "I QUIT".... I have read multiple reviews about this book and I must agree that I just don't understand this book - not at all.

When I first heard about this book and it's premise, I was really excited. I love reading fantasy and magical stories. My first thoughts were, "awesome, another book about the Jinn... I just can't wait." I am so extremely disappointed that this book ended up being nothing I expected. It read like some boring history lesson with a monotone voice.

I could not connect with the characters or the storyline. I really did not care about any of it. Even though there were small parts of the story that I started to enjoy and thought that the worst was behind...that the story was going to come to life finally...I was disappointed each and every time. New characters were thrown in randomly and I could not connect the dots between them. I had no idea how they fit together or why they were even part of the book.

As mentioned above, I found this book so boring... It turned out to be a better sleeping aid then an exciting story to read and enjoy. Every time I picked up the book, I found myself falling asleep within a few paragraphs. Unfortunately, because I was unable to stay connected to the story, I also could not retain much information about the characters. I started to forget about those that I read about earlier in the book and the idea of re-reading earlier pages to remember them was completely unappealing.

I am completely upset that this book - having received a lot of hype - turned out to be a big fail for me. I am truly sorry that Salman Rushdie cannot be added to my shelf of favorite authors. His style of writing is just not for me. I am sure that there are many readers who may enjoy his approach, but unfortunately, I am not one of them.

I hope that Salman Rushdie had as much fun writing Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights as I had reading it. There’s comedy, satire, great storytelling, fantasy, philosophy and page after page of outstanding writing. Rushdie presents a hilarious cast of characters who are jinn, creatures so much like us and more so. The powers of the jinn will delight and entertain most readers. I can assure most readers that you have never read a novel quite like this one.

Rating: Five-star (I love it)