According to Salman Rushdie’s new novel, most of what we know about genies is wrong, which makes me worry that I may have spent too much time watching Barbara Eden. The harem pants, the wish-granting, that eager “master” talk — turns out, it’s all pure fantasy. “It was extremely unwise to believe that such potent, slippery beings could have masters,” Rushdie writes. And we’re not even using the right term. “The name of the immense force that had entered the world was jinn.”Those fiery, smokeless...

*I got an advance copy of this book from the publisher in return of an honest reviewFinally done with this book!! I would have completed it way back had I not been super-busy and tired. So, it took me a lot more days than I usually require to finish a books of this size.Coming back to the book, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is the latest book from the renowned author Salman Rushdie. His book Midnight's Children is the only book that has received more than one Booker Prize. This...

how were such things to be understood? it was easier to believe that Chance, always the hidden principle of the universe, was joining forces with allegory, symbolism, surrealism and chaos, and taking charge of human affairs, than it was to accept the truth, namely the growing interference of the jinn in the daily life of the world. like an apologal avengers/peter pan mash-up with scheherazade as the origin story, salman rushdie's latest novel, two years eight months and twenty-eight nights is

You Ain't Ever Had a Friend, Never Had a Friend, Like MeRushdie's OutRaged Roaring: All Religions are Mere Fairy Tales, Believed Only by DupesI looked forward to enjoying a fantastic novel, with a premise full of promise. As it turned out though, I was repulsed by Rushdie's attempt to aim "brilliant" fire at all religions and their "wholly ignorant" followers. He misfired with what turns out, ironically, a preachy "fauxfun" in an allegorical tale a la Ali Baba. This tale (or, should I say, platf...

http://www.themaineedge.com/buzz/rush...It’s no secret that the line between genre fiction and literary fiction has become blurry in recent years. The tropes of fantasy and science fiction have been embraced by many writers operating outside the confines implied by genre, leading to a richer and more meaningful experience on both signs of that increasingly-hard-to-see line.Salman Rushdie has never been afraid to incorporate genre conventions into his own work. The author’s latest is “Two Years E...

This is my first Rushdie book and I do intend to check out his more famous and controversial works - The Satanic Verses and Midnight's Children - but I have a lot of mixed feelings about my first venture into his world.As far as I know, Mr Rushdie writes in English, correct? But even though there are some instances of beautiful writing, much of this story feels like a clunky translation. The third person "history of the jinn" that we get is, for the most part, coldly distant and reads like a tex...

Everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale. Our lives are stories encased in a giant Matryoshka doll. An endless saga of happenings that jumps narration from one brand of mystery to the next bland stamp in the potpourri of the decaying universe. Our timelines cross each other’s endlessly entwining with the myriad strangenesses that are our stories: our individual stories, the stories of the street we grew up on, our family stories, and so on. Human beings ar

I would like to preface my review of this sprawling, multi-layered, fantastical novel by reiterating my deep admiration for Sir Salman Rushdie and his writing. The man is a literary deity touched by genius; he bites his thumb at social and religious taboos and laughs in the face of literary propriety.Perhaps idealistically I approach each of his novels with the high expectation that he might one day recoup the enchantment of Midnight’s Children (his crowning glory). Sadly, this never happens.Two...

Jinn's live in their own world. They are creatures of smokeless fire. They are separated from our human world. Jinnia, is a Princess that falls in love and marries a 'human'....a philosopher named Ibn Rushd......They have many children with human power-characteristics and Jinn powers, (fly, or slithering descendants - good- bad- and uninterested in morality). Jinnia, herself, has a special heart for humans, ...with a wise understanding between the differences that divide both worlds. She reaches...

Rushdie's novel is a headache-inducing regurgitation of his major themes, which were fresh in the late-1980s, but are now out of date. Metamorphoses abound, as does the blurring of fact and fiction. The worlds of fact and fiction blend, the wall that separates pop culture and high culture disintegrates. The dark world of faith-based fascistic religion battles the light of open-mindedness, art, storytelling. Characters emerge with the frequency of a Dickens' novel, but they neither posses agency

"All our stories contain the stories of others and are themselves contained within larger, grander narratives." As a first draft, this playful adult fairytale of high jinx and low jinn promises much.As a finished novel, it’s as capricious and shape-shifting as the jinn therein. Enjoyable at first, but progressively less so.I was glad when I closed the pages for the last time, with the hopeful finality of stuffing a jinn in a tightly sealed bottle. “The subject kept changing, and how could anyone...

"In the end, rage, no matter how profoundly justified, destroys the enraged. Just as we are created anew by what we love, so we are reduced and unmade by what we hate."- Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights."This is a story from our past, from a time so remote we argue, sometimes, about wither we should call it history or mythology. Some of us call it a fairy tale. But on this we agree: that to tell a story about the past is to tell a story about the present. To recount...

A dizzying, imaginative, philosophical mosaic of a novel. Of course, the title is a reference to "1,001 Nights" and, like that work, a major element featured here is stories - the stories that come down to us from history, and the stories that we tell ourselves.Although the content is quite different, the 'feel' of this book reminded me quite a bit of Umberto Eco's 'Mysterious Flame of Queen Loana.'Narrated from an opaque utopia, 1000 years in the future, we are told of the great war that change...

Magical Realism? I would have guessed fantasy. This book really crosses the line from magical realism into fantasy. I love fantasy, but some people will care that this book is about imaginary creatures (jinnis) set in an imaginary world (a world with a veil between it and another world where magic and magical creatures can cross through from one to the other) which is the definition of fantasy fiction. I have read books by Rushdie before and I was floored by the beauty of the language and his u...

It's really intimidating to put up the first review on a Rushdie novel....so I'm just going to sit on this for a week or two until I have properly put my words and thoughts together.I think the main thing we can take away from this is that jinni love sex.

Gotta admit, Salman Rushdie's brand of self-indulgent fanciful fiction will probably never win 'Best of' awards from me (in fact, the only reason I bothered reading this was my recent obsession with his ex-wife, "Top Chef"'s host Padma Lakshmi, to try to {however vicariously} live through him). There was enough here to appreciate his Pynchon-esque intellect, but this modern day update of the timeless "1001 Arabian Nights" fell somewhat flat for me. The whole time I was reading this I was constan...

There is no other writer like Rushdie out there. He has a perfect combination between the understanding of Oriental and Western philosophy, myth and modern developments. This allows him to web together stories that include Facebook, but also jinni spirits from the olden days. You get the feeling that his worlds are, in fact, so fantastic, that they are too fantastic. But this is what I love about his writing, and I'm sure a lot of people do: he does not get stuck in one single register. He doesn...

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)

Deliberately fantastical novel, consciously based around the power of storytelling and the mixing of human and spirit worlds in “1001 and 1 Nights”.The story is actually narrated 1000 years in the future focusing on a period of 1001 days (shortly after the present day) when the jinn world suddenly breaks through into the human world causing chaos. The book also goes back to the 12th Century and a dispute between two real-life Islamic philosophers: the pious theologian Ghazali of Iran (Renewer of...

This is the story of a jinnia, a great princess of the jinn, known as the Lightning Princess on account of her mastery over the thunderbolt, who loved a mortal man long ago, in the twelfth century, as we would say, and of her many descendants, and of her return to the world, after a long absence, to fall in love again, at least for a moment, and then to go to war. It is also the tale of many other jinn, male and female, flying and slithering, good, bad, and uninterested in morality; and of th