By all means do not
allow the reputation of Salman Rushdie prevent you from reading his latest
novel, Two Years Eight Months and
Twenty-Eight Days. Like all his
works – with the possible exception of The
Satanic Verses – his latest novel contains jokes, puns, humor, and
erudition of every sort. According to
his website, Rushdie has won numerous awards from around the world, including the
U.S., France, Germany, The European Union, Mexico, Italy, Hungary, and India,
to name only a few. He holds honorary doctorates and
fellowships at six European and six American universities, is an Honorary
Professor in the Humanities at M.I.T, and University Distinguished Professor at
Emory University. His list of
humanitarian and cultural awards from around the world is equally
impressive. His Booker Prize winning
novel, Midnight’s Children, was
adapted for the stage in London and New York,
and by a public vote, the novel was overwhelmingly named the “Best of the
Booker.” It was also turned into a film
and translated into forty languages.
Only the Nobel Prize eludes him, which, in my opinion, stems from the unfortunate
uproar surrounding the publication of Satanic
Verses. He is truly an international
literary treasure.
Deep in to the novel, Rushdie provides an interesting theory
of “story.” He writes, “We tell this story still as it has come down
to us through many retellings, mouth to ear, ear to mouth, both the story and
the poisoned box and the stories it contained, in which the poison was
concealed. This is what stories are,
experience retold by many tongues, to which, sometimes, we give a single name,
Homer, Valmiki, Vyasa, Schererzade. We,
for our own part, simply call ourselves ‘we.’
‘We’ are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort
of creature it is. As they pass down to
us the stories lift themselves away from time and place, losing the specificity
of their beginnings, but gaining the purity of essences, of being simply
themselves. And by extension, or by
the same token, as we like to say, though
we do not know what the token is or was, these stories become what we know,
what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should say, what we have become,
or can perhaps be” (182-183).
Admittedly, reading Rushdie requires great concentration,
lest the reader miss out on all the fun.
My review will concentrate only on the second chapter, which has all his
powerful attributes at full strength.
The novel revolves around the tales in the style of the thousand and one
tales of Scheherazade; that is, the story of a jinniri, Dunia, who slipped
between worlds and interacted with ordinary mortals. Some of these jinni (male) or jinniri
(female), were good, some evil, but all were mischievous. Ibn Rushd fell under the spell of the princess
of the jinniri, and she produced thousands of children, all of whom had no
earlobes. Her group of jinniri were
known as Duniazát, and Rushd forbade her to take his name for any of the
children. Hundreds of years later, a
descendant of Dunia, Raphael Heironymus Manzes known as Mr. Geronimo Manzes, had no earlobes. When the slit between the worlds opened again,
jinni and jinniri poured into our world, wreaking havoc known as “The Strangenesses.” Geronimo was affected when he suddenly found
himself unable to touch the ground with any part of his body. He had been away many years, and found the
new Bombay – Mumbai – dramatically different.
Rushdie writes, “It was the garden that spoke to Geronimo. It seemed to be clawing at the house, snaking
its way inside, trying to destroy the barriers that separated the exterior
space from the interior. In the upper
regions of the house, flowers and grass successfully surmounted its walls, and
the floor became a lawn. He left that
place knowing he no longer wanted to be an architect. […] Manzes made his way to Kyoto in Japan and
sat at the feet of the great horticulturist Ryonosuke Shimura, who taught him
that the garden was the outward expression of inner truth, the place where the
dreams of our childhoods collided with the archetypes of our cultures, and
created beauty” (35).
Salman Rushdie’s
intellectual allegory, Two Years Eight
Months and Twenty-Eight Days, brings to one time and place – the present –
and lays all the problems and difficulties we face from climate change to
financial collapse at the feet of the jinni and jinniri. The web of “Magic Realism” stories Rushdie
has spun will enchant and dismay at times, but those tales will always
intrigue. 5 stars
--Chiron, 12/18/15
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