Review by New York Times Review
SALMAN RUSHDIE'S literary immortality is assured. His second novel, "Midnight's Children," lit up fiction in English with the exuberance of a Diwali firework. It was uniquely honored, winning both the prestigious Man Booker Prize and the Booker of Bookers, for the best novel in the prize's history. With his fourth novel, "The Satanic Verses," Rushdie, like the sorcerer's apprentice, inadvertently conjured a jinni of intolerance. The spiritual leader of the Islamic Republic of Iran denounced the book and called for Rushdie's murder. During his long period in hiding, Rushdie was protected by British security services but he received far from unconditional support. He was not just criticized by religious opponents; various secular politicians and commentators suggested that he'd knowingly kicked a hornet's nest, and that he should have known better. There were unpleasant personal attacks. British newspapers made miserly quibbles about the cost of his police protection. 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 "strangenesses," where the "laws which had long been accepted as the governing principles of reality had collapsed." The strangenesses - 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 Gerónimo. "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. Rushdie was never a writer who tiptoed stealthily into the reader's imagination, avoiding the creaking floorboards of incredulity. He has always indulged the enchanter's power to say "fiat lux" and populate his fictional world with whatever he chooses. "Capaciousness, inclusiveness, everything-at-once-ness, breadth, width, depth, bigness: These were the values to which a tall, long-striding, broad-shouldered man like himself should cleave," Geronimo thinks. And Rushdie has been a courageous and liberating example of someone who's consistently rejected any constraints on his imagination, aesthetic or theological. But while it's true that novels are capacious and composed of superfluities, if a book is everything it risks being a formless nothing. The new novel quickly becomes a breathless mash-up of wormholes, mythical creatures, current affairs and disquisitions on philosophy and theology. Behind its glittery encrustations, the plot resembles the bare outline for a movie about superheroes. There's a war between worlds, lightning comes out of people's fingertips and it all culminates in a blockbuster showdown between the forces of good and evil. A further conceit is that the tale is being told in the future by a civilization that has outgrown the needs of faith and religion. "This is a story from our past," its narrator tells us, "from a time so remote that we argue, sometimes, about whether we should call it history or mythology." The narrator may be foggy on the genre and some key details of the actual story, but somehow, after over a thousand years, his recollection of Jet Li, Batman, Kim Novak, Larry Hagman and the divorce arrangements of the Wildensteins remains undimmed. Of course, complaining that Rushdie's not a naturalistic writer is like criticizing kimchi for its cabbagey funk. This invention and prolixity have been intoxicating in Rushdie novels when there's been some compelling principle at work - a distinct narrative voice, a single central character whose story is unfolded more patiently as in his previous New York novel, "Fury." But here the narrative sprawls; digressions and minor characters multiply. Anything can go in, so everything does. The author changes accents, cracks wise, lectures the reader on mythology. The North Korean leader Kim Jong-un makes a cameo appearance; so does Al Qaeda; so do story lines by absurdist writers Beckett, Ionesco and Gogol. THE BOOK HAS no shortage of ideas and allusions. Dunia's children are the offspring of a liaison with the rationalist Muslim philosopher Averroes, or Ibn Rushd, whose name the author's family adopted. There's a continuing debate between Ibn Rushd and the theologian al-Ghazali about reason and religious belief. Yet the novel's physical world is thinly evoked. The strangenesses multiply, but they are hard to picture. The book seems both overpopulated and underimagined. The prose is often portentously vague. "Things had reached a point at which only science fiction gave people a way of getting a handle on what the formerly real world's non-C.G.I. mundanity seemed incapable of making comprehensible." Abstraction and competing negations turn this sentence into a mystifying fog. "Even though the normality of the city had been disrupted, most people hadn't been able to get their heads around it, and were still dumbfounded by the irruption of the fantastic into the quotidian." You get the idea, but what do you see? As the storytelling grows more manic, what comes through clearly - much too clearly - is the novel's controlling theme: an allegory about humanity's struggle between superstition and reason. "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 authorlessness 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. The most felt things in the book are about Geronimo the gardener, lonely and aging in an unfamiliar city. He is doubly uprooted, separated both from the earth itself and the Indian birthplace that he loved. The prose quickens with specific detail when he mourns the loss of his childhood home: "He wished he had never become detached from the place he was born, wished his feet had remained planted on that beloved ground, wished he could have been happy all his life in those childhood streets, and grown into an old man there and known every paving stone, every betel-nut vendor's story, every boy selling pirated novels at traffic lights." It's a huge relief when Geronimo finds himself back on more solid ground; it will be an ever bigger one when his author does too. MARCEL THEROUX'S most recent novel is "Strange Bodies."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 4, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The jinn, Rushdie tells us, are creatures made of smokeless fire, shape-shifters infused with powers that defy our experience of gravity and time. They live in their own world, yet they can't resist meddling in our affairs. But the Lightning Princess is different. For all her fearsome mastery over the thunderbolt, she falls in love with a mortal in the twelfth century, a Spanish Arab philosopher whose books, the most famous of which is The Incoherence of the Incoherence, are banned and burned because he argues for rationalism instead of religious fundamentalism. This man of reason is Ibn Rushd, the very thinker Rushdie's father honored when he invented a new, more modern family. Now this historic figure serves as the guiding light for his namesake's latest rambunctious, satirical, and bewitching metaphysical fable, perhaps his most thoroughly enjoyable to date. At once a scholar, rigorous observer, and lavishly imaginative novelist, Rushdie channels his well-informed despair over the brutality and absurdity of human life into works of fantasy, where the dream of righteous justice and transcendent liberty can flourish. His thirteenth work of fiction begins with the fateful liaison between the lovely jinn and the old philosopher, which, thanks to Dunia's supernatural fertility, produces the first generation of an undetected tribe of descendants who look and feel human but who lack earlobes and possess secret jinn powers. Rushdie leaps forward 1,000 years from now, when future chroniclers look back to our fraught, accelerating epoch to tell a tale of the time of strangenesses, which lasted for two years, eight months and twenty-eight days, which is to say, one thousand nights and one night more. With this enchanting declaration, Rushdie adds a new link to the long narrative chain that connects us to that most marvelous and life-saving of storytellers, Scheherazade, who risked her life to put an end to a king's murderous rampage by telling him 1,001 beguiling tales. Brave and brilliant Scheherazade has inspired countless writers through the ages. Rushdie acknowledged his debt in earlier works, including The Moor's Last Sigh (1996), and homage is also found in Naguib Mahfouz's Arabian Nights and Days (1995), Vikram Chandra's Red Earth and Pouring Rain (1995), Martin Amis' The Pregnant Widow (2010), Rabih Alameddine's The Hakawati (2008), Nelida Pinon's Voices of the Desert (2009), and John Barth's Chimera (1972) and The Book of Ten Nights and a Night (2004), which takes place directly after September 11, 2001. The long spell of strangenesses is precipitated by an apocalyptic storm that devastates New York City. In its aftermath, a hardworking gardener, an earlobe-less Indian from India known as Mr. Geronimo, finds that his feet no longer touched the ground. Meanwhile, in Queens, a wormhole opens between the worlds of the jinn and humans in the bedroom of Jimmy Kapoor, a young wannabe graphic novelist. Many more manifestations of the wondrous, weird, and inexplicable occur as a war of the worlds begins, stoked from beyond by none other than Ibn Rushd, still loved by Dunia, and his real-life archrival, the religious thinker Ghazali, who, in Rushdie's fabulist scenario, is aligned with the most terrifying jinn of them all. Philosophy, like religion, can be dangerous. Rushdie is having wickedly wise fun here. Every character has a keenly hilarious backstory, and the action (flying carpets and urns, gigantic attacking serpents, lightning strikes, to-the-death combat, sex) surges from drastic and pulse-raising to exuberantly madcap, magical, and genuinely emotional. Rushdie scatters intriguing allusions (Beckett, Magritte, Gogol, Obama) about like fairy dust and coins of the realm while sustaining swiftly flowing, incisive, piercingly funny commentary on everything from religious extremists to reality TV, anti-Semitism and racism, and economic injustice. Rushdie muses over kismet and our perpetual bewilderment about the harsh realities of life, made worse by war and global warming. He even offers a wry glimpse into the future to conclude this fantastically inventive, spirited, astute, and delectable update of One Thousand and One Nights.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In his latest novel, Rushdie (Joseph Anton) invents his own cultural narrative-one that blends elements of One Thousand and One Nights, Homeric epics, and sci-fi and action/adventure comic books. The title is a reference to the magical stretch of time that unites the book's three periods, which are actually millennia apart. In the first period (the 12th century), jinn princess Dunia falls in love with real-life philosopher and advocate of reason and science Averroes (aka Ibn Rushd) and bears multiple children. In the second period (current day), Dunia's descendants, a group including a gardener and a young graphic novelist, are unaware of their powerful lineage (despite the fact that they inherited Dunia's trademark earlobelessness). Then they witness a great storm devastating New York; worse, a slit between the jinn world and the human world opens and the dark jinn slip through. The gardener suddenly finds himself levitating, the artist hosting jinn in his room. Dunia returns to defend the human race by confronting her four fiercest enemies, one by one: Zumurrud, Zabardast, Shining Ruby, and Ra'im Blood-Drinker. Rushdie even incorporates a third period, a far-future millennium, further tying his story together across time. His magical realism celebrates the power of metaphor, while both historic accounts and fables are imbued with familiar themes of migration and separation, reason and faith, repression and freedom. Referencing Henry James, Mel Brooks, Mickey Mouse, Gracian, Bravo TV, and Aristotle, among others, Rushdie provides readers with an intellectual treasure chest cleverly disguised as a comic pop-culture apocalyptic caprice. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
Review by Library Journal Review
What if today's violence and political instability could be blamed on jinnis? That is the premise of this latest novel from Rushdie (The Enchantress of Florence). Here, the War of the Two Worlds is a proxy war between dark and light jinnis and also a war between religious fundamentalism and reason, with roots going back to 12th-century Spain and the dusty corpses of two philosophers, Ghazali and Ibn Rushd. Ghazali, having rescued a powerful jinn named Zumurrud Shah from a bottle, used one of his wishes to send Zumurrud to wreak havoc on Earth. In contrast, Rushd was a man of reason, as well as a lover of the jinnia Dunia and the forefather of the Duniazát, a tribe of human-jinni hybrids birthed by Dunia, who has a weakness for humanity. The hybrids are unaware of their jinn heritage, and with the dark jinn deploying events such as war, terrorism, and global climate change as weapons, it is up to Dunia to activate the jinn in her descendants so they can fight Zumurrud and his friends (imagine drunken jinni frat boys run amok on Earth). VERDICT Most readers will overlook Rushdie's not-so-subtle scolding in this rollicking magical realist adventure, which is fast paced and accessible. It can be enjoyed as a fairy-tale adventure, literary fiction, or a political allegory for our times. [See Prepub Alert, 3/23/15.]-Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
"It's a terrible thing when one speaks metaphorically and the metaphor turns into a literal truth." So writes Rushdie (Joseph Anton: A Memoir, 2012, etc.) in one of his very best books, one whose governing metaphor can be about many terrible truths indeed.Do the math, and Rushdie's title turns into a different way of counting up to 1,001 nights. Small wonder that the first characters we encounter are an exceedingly wise philosopher named, thinly, Ibn Rushd, "the translator of Aristotle," and an exceedingly beguiling supernatural being in the form of a girl of about 16 who harbors numerous secrets, not just that she's Jewish in a place overrun with Islamic fundamentalists (and where it's thus best to live as "Jews who could not say they were Jews"), but that she is, in fact, one of the jiniri, "shadow-women made of fireless smoke." Got all that? In the span of, yes, 1,001 nights, Dunia gives birth to three broods of children who, being jinn, can do all sorts of cool things, such as fly about on magic carpets or slither hither and yon like snakes. Dunia is studiously irreligious, which is perhaps more dangerous than being Jewish, inclined to say of Ibn Rushd's explanations of all the wonderful things God can do, "That's stupid." Her endless children are inclined to favor the secular over the divine as well, a complicating factor when the dimensions turn all inside out and the jinn, now in our time, are called on to battle the forces of evil that have been hiding on the other side of the metaphorical wall betweenwell, civilizations, maybe. Rushdie turns in a sometimes archly elegant, sometimes slightly goofy fairy talewith a character named Bento V. Elfenbein, how could it be entirely serious?for grown-ups: "A fairy king," he writes, and he knows whereof he speaks, "can only be poisoned by the most dreadful and powerful of words." Beguiling and astonishing, wonderful and wondrous. Rushdie at his best. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
