Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights: Magical realism with folktale feel

Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie

From the moment I started listening to Salman Rushdie’s new book, Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights, I was enchanted. I wasn’t sure what to expect, not ever having read a Rushdie book before, but his leisurely, indirect storytelling style reminded me of a fairy or folk tale, like the 1001 Nights that Rushdie cleverly takes his title from.

Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights tells the story of the jinnia Dunia, her lovers, her countless human/jinn progeny, and their efforts in the war between the worlds of humanity and the jinn, who have entered our realm and begun sowing chaos, violence, and madness. Dunia, who has fallen in love with two human men and, in consequence, all of humanity, is on the side of Earth; her ancient rivals, the jinn Zummurrud and Zabardast, are leading the jinni force from Fairyland against humanity.

And the story is being told 1000 years in the future, by the descendants of the human victors, who piece it together from legend, remaining relics, and scraps of documents. This far future perspective blends an almost-omniscient narrator with the distance and skepticism of myth. Most of the action happens in summary rather than in scene, breaking the first rule of storytelling, “show, don’t tell,” but, like Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Rushdie makes it work for him. As such, he’s able to step back and make profound observations about humanity, religion, knowledge, and storytelling, such as: “We are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is.”

Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights is not all airy-fairy tone and proverbs about the meaning of life, though. Rushdie blends a sense of ridiculousness into his plot. Dunia’s first lover, the philosopher Ibn Rushd (who is a real-life figure and whose name echoes Rushdie’s), is locked in an eternal disagreement with his philosophical rival, the theologian Ghazali. Even after death, these characters continue their arguments about the nature of God and religion, although Rushdie is quick to remind us that he has no idea how they, being less than dust, are conducting their conversation.

It is Ibn Rushd who is the father of the Duniazad, all of Dunia’s human descendants. Centuries later, Dunia returns to earth to fall in love with one of her own great-great-great-great, etc. (Rushdie jokes about this, too) grandsons, the middle-aged gardener and widower, Mr. Geronimo. He is alerted to the altered state of the world — the Strangenesses, as Rushdie terms it — when he wakes up one morning unable to make contact with the ground. He floats above the floor and as the days go on, the distance between him and the rest of the world grows. Another of Dunia’s descendants, Jimmy Kapoor, is an unsuccessful comic-book artist who finds his creation sprung to life in a vision (it’s actually one of the jinn) and then discovers that he’s been endowed with superhuman powers.

The stories of Dunia’s loves, her descendants, and the battle between the jinn are all nested and intertwined together. One moment, you are with Mr. Geronimo as he surveys his ruined garden on the banks of the Hudson. The next moment, you are in the eternal past of Fairyland, finding out the history between Dunia and her lover/rivals, Zummerrud and Zabardast, who have come to destroy the world. There are hilarious scenes of American businessmen being possessed by jinn interspersed with ominous scenes of relentless human assassins pursing the deadly jinn. It’s all a big muddle, but it works.

The ending of the battle between the worlds wrapped up a bit quickly for me, but Rushdie takes his time explaining what its consequences were. For humans, it meant an entire and complete disenchantment with religion and the idea of God, the ushering in of a golden age of reason and development and civilization. People are happy, well-fed, tolerant, and fulfilled. But even this fantasy of a world without religion admits that faith offers something lovely, if intangible. Because, now, one thing is lacking:

“Fewer and fewer of us, in each successive generation, retained the ability to dream, until now we find ourselves in a time when dreams are things we would dream of, if we could only dream. We read of you in ancient books, O dreams, but the dream factories are closed. This is the price we pay for peace, prosperity, tolerance, understanding, wisdom, goodness, and truth: that the wildness in us, which sleep unleashed, has been tamed.”

I listened to Two Years, Eight Months, and Twenty-Eight Nights narrated by Robert G. Slade in a Random House Audio production. Slade’s voice was smooth and wry, perfectly capturing the distance, amusement, and wonder of the thirtieth-century narrators.