Salman Rushdie’s book creates a unique spin on old tales
Nothing fishy here · Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is author Salman Rushdie’s latest book. A play on Sheherezade’s One Thousand and One Nights, Rushdie explores different magical worlds. Though acclaimed, Rushdie has been embroiled in controversies. – Photo courtesy of Salman Rushdie
With midterms in full swing, and work and responsibility raining down on everyone’s heads, Salman Rushdie’s Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights provides some welcome magic and entertainment. This is the newest book by the controversial author, who has dealt with brutal critics. Rushdie has also been through a fatwa, an Islamic religious ruling, among other things, in response to his recent works. Nevertheless, he returns to his old brilliance with a dazzling epic of a novel.
I chose to read this book because the title, a play on the classic One Thousand And One Nights — the same amount of time as two years eight months and 28 days — was interesting to me. I’m a great fan of fairy tales and classic folk tales, so this modern retelling of Sheherezade’s enchanted stories seemed like it would be right up my alley. I wasn’t wrong. Rushdie has concocted a tale that is both grand yet intimate and sure to captivate readers.
The plot itself is too overwhelming to try to summarize, with not one but truly a thousand and one stories within the pages of each other. Each story springs from one another, miraculously intertwined and ranging across time and space. The story, on the whole, follows the intermingling of our world and the world of the jinns and jinnias. These are creatures of lust, magic and mischief who occasionally visit Earth through cracks in walls to play with the emotions of mankind or even take a male lover.
Such is the case with one such jinnia, referred to by many names including the Lightning Princess and Dunia. She meets and embarks on a relationship with an exiled philosopher, Ibn Rushd, who has been banned from his position in court for his writings supporting reason, logic and science, which are deemed to conflict with the ruling power’s doctrine of God’s complete power. During their romance, marriage and Dunia’s overwhelming number of pregnancies, Ibn Rushd placates his tempestuous wife with stories. It is, of course, worth remarking that Rushd bears an uncanny resemblance to Rushdie himself, as a highly criticized writer who relies on the art of storytelling. Eventually, Rushd leaves Dunia, unaware of her true mythical nature. In time, she retreats to her own world of magic, luxury and sexuality. This culminates in the closing of the gaps between the two worlds.
Then, hundreds of years later, in a time a little after our own, strange events happen in North America. An elderly gardener who relies on the use of reason and rejects all fantasy wakes up one morning and discovers that his feet do not touch the ground. This is only the beginning of a series of fantastical events — including tumultuous weather, a baby who can mark corrupt individuals with a single touch and a comic who encounters a strange apparition in his home — spanning, of course, two years, eight months and 28 nights. Evidently, the divide between our world and that of the jinn has been reopened.
The narrative is neither episodic nor continuous, but rather an intricate web of stories within larger stories, and stories that grow from other stories. What I loved about reading this book was its supernatural nature. I’ve always appreciated a little bit of wackiness in books as it makes me feel like I’m not just staring at a picture of my own world. I love the hilarious merging of the magical and the practical, as the levitating gardener contemplates every possibility but the mystical to explain why he leaves no footprints as he walks through the mud. I love the way that the story feels like a crazy whirlwind of characters and worlds — the reader has been thrown into the mix as well. There is also some truly gorgeous language, such as his description of “a girl of perhaps sixteen summers,” which truly sounds like the language of the original Arabian Nights, or his comical comparisons of New York City and Eden.
Still, beneath the comedy and artful manipulation of language, Rushdie is trying to tell us something more serious. The battle between the religious extremists and the men of science is not even thinly veiled. Rushdie alludes to the importance of not only logic and reason, but also of keeping an open mind to all things otherworldly. At the end of the day, this is a classic good-versus-evil story, but I can honestly say that I have never seen a story told like this before. Though the book has received some criticism for being too convoluted, I think the wildness of the plot and the multitudes of characters, places and events creates so much magic and beauty on the page that it is only a positive thing.
At the end of the day, I love magic. I also love innovative writing. I picked up this book because I thought it would provide a nice break from studying, but it ended up giving me so much more than that. Every time I opened the black and silver cover of my hardback copy, I found myself wholly engulfed into a world so different from my own, and yet so vivid and gorgeous. I almost wished I could stay in this make-believe world forever.
Kirsten Greenwood is a sophomore majoring in English. Her column, “By the Book,” runs every Friday.