I’m really surprised that I’ve never read Salman Rushdie before, but I picked up his most recent book, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights because it was on the express shelf at my library. I actually picked it up by accident, because, for some reason, I read the author’s name as Sherman Alexie, who is the author of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and I thought he’d come out with a new book. I know. I call it Mom Brain.
But I’m glad I accidentally picked up this book. Once I got started with it, I could hardly put it down.
It’s hard to describe Rushdie’s style. He is a masterful storyteller. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights tells the story of the djinn, which were like genies in Arabian and Islamic mythology. But the way that Rushdie told this story was like a history of sorts. You had the feeling that you were reading a true account of how djinnis tried once to overtake the world and were defeated. Not only that, but the characters were weird and interesting and had distinct personalities of their own. It was a fantastically written book, although I will admit this one took me much longer to read than most books, probably because Rushdie has a very intellectual style, which I really enjoy but which takes longer to process and fully digest.
Throughout his pages, Rushdie had passages that contributed to the work seeming like a true story. Take this one, for example:
“How treacherous history is! Half-truths, ignorance, deceptions, false trails, errors, and lies, and buried somewhere in between all of that, the truth, in which it is easy to lose faith, of which it is consequently easy to say, it’s a chimera, there’s no such thing, everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale; but about which we insist, we insist most emphatically, that it is too important an idea to give up to the relativity merchants.”
One of my favorite elements to Rushdie’s book was the way he interspersed it with social commentary.
“History is unkind to those it abandons, and can be equally unkind to those who make it.”
“What happens to our mind befalls our body also. The condition of the body is also the state of the mind.”
“It was the resilience in human beings that represented their best chance of survival, their ability to look the unimaginable, the unconscionable, the unprecedented in the eye.”
Not only did he give us social commentary that felt like a truth, but he also made it poetic, and the poetry made it ever more profound. Here he is, commenting on the religious world and on history:
“Perhaps, as a godly man, he would not have been delighted by the place history gave him, for it is a strange fate for a believer to become the inspiration of ideas that have no need for belief, and a stranger fate still for a man’s philosophy to be victorious beyond the frontiers of his own world but vanquished within those borders…”
“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.”
His work was abundant with beautiful imagery:
“Their childhoods slipped into the water and were lost, the piers built of memories on which they once ate candy and pizza, the boardwalks of desire under which they hid from the summer sun and kissed their first lips.”
“But when the light returned it felt different. This was a white light they had not seen before, harsh as an interrogator’s lamp, casting now shadows, merciless leaving no place to hide. Beware, the light seemed to say, for I come to burn and judge.”
“Above the gates of the estate a live wire swung dangerously, with death at its tip.”
“The tree roots standing up in the black mud like arms of drowning men.”
Rushdie’s characters in Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights, were strange yet charming, with personalities that one would not soon forget (reminiscent of the characters in Daniel Handler’s We Are Pirates). Rushdie is a master at giving his characters distinctive voices, though the book was written in third-person perspective. I had a grand time studying his methods.
Here’s one of his characters who runs an apartment complex in a bad part of town:
“Gun crazy was normal to her, shooting-kids-at-school or putting-on-a-Joker-mask-and-mowing—people-down-in-a-mall or just plain murdering-your-mom-at-breakfast crazy, Second Amendment crazy, that was just the everyday crazy that kept going down and there was nothing you could do about it if you loved freedom; and she understood knife crazy from her you’re days in the Bronx, and the knockout-game type of crazy that persuaded young black kids it was cool to punch Jews in the face. She could comprehend drug crazy and politician crazy and Westboro Baptist Church crazy and Trump crazy because those things, they were the America way, but this new crazy was different. It felt 9/11 crazy: foreign, evil. The devil was on the loose, Sister said, loudly and often. The devil was at work.”
This was another passage that not only expertly characterized but also lent to the book a historic feel—with the references to a guy putting on a Joker mask and Westboro and even Trump. These are references that don’t feel contrived and, also, don’t date the book as some might fear (sometimes that keeps writers from putting in cultural references). It’s likely that these things—Trump, Westboro Baptist Church and the Joker mask killer—will be remembered for a very long time.
Here’s Rushdie writing about another character, Blue Yasmeen, in one of the most brilliant characterization passages in the book:
“Blue Yasmeen’s hair wasn’t blue, it was orange, and her name wasn’t Yasmeen. Never mind. If she said blue was orange that was her right, and Yasmeen was her nom de guerre and yeah, she lived in the city as if it were a war zone because even though she had been born on 116th Street to a Columbia literature professor and his wife, she wanted to recognize that originally, before that, which was to say before fucking birth, she came from Beirut. She had shaved off her eyebrows and tatted new ones in their place, in jagged lightning-bolt shapes. Her body too was a tat zone. All the tattoos except the eyebrows were words, the usual ones, Love Imagine Yeezy Occupy, and she said of herself, unintentionally proving that there was more in her of Riverside Drive than Hamra Street, that she was intratextual as well as intrasexual, she lived between the words as well as the sexes. Blue Yasmeen had made a splash in the art world with her Guantanamo Bay installation, which was impressive if only for the powers of persuasion required to make it happen at all: she somehow got that impenetrable facility to allow her to set a chair in a room with a video camera facing it, and linked that to a dummy sitting in a Chelsea art gallery, so that when inmates sat in the Guantanamo chair room and told their stories their faces were projected onto the head of the Chelsea dummy and it was as if she had freed them and given them their voices, and yeah, the issue was freedom, motherfuckers, freedom, she hated terrorism as much as anyone, but she hated miscarriages of justice too, and, FYI, just in case you were wondering, just in case you had her down as a religious-fanatic terrorist in waiting, she had no time for God, plus she was a pacifist and a vegan, so fuck you.”
There is so much to say about this passage. The repetition of the word “yeah” and all the cussing and even the tiny little references to things like, “she wanted to recognize that” and “FYI, just in case you were wondering,” gives the impression that Blue Yasmeen is speaking to us, even though a narrator is actually our go-between. It was fantastic prose.
One of my other favorite characterization passages was this one (because I’m a mom of six boys and, also, juvenile):
“He was waiting for the word from the Lightning Princess. Sometimes for a change he headed south to Calvary or Mount Zion cemeteries and blew the heads off stone lions in those locations also, and performed new changes, he could turn solid objects into smells now, one minute it was a bench, the next it was a fart, it was the accumulation of all the farts farted by old farts male and female sitting on that bench thinking about other old farts, now deceased, Macfart shall fart no more.”
I laughed so hard at this passage and even had to read it to my husband so I didn’t have to laugh alone. That one could take a book as serious and horrific as this one and infuse humor into it is astounding and the mark of a skilled author.
It wasn’t the only time Rushdie used humor in his pages, which I found endearing. Here’s another short humorous thought:
“Beware of the man (or jinni) of action when he finally seeks to better himself with thought. A little thinking is a dangerous thing.”
This book was a fantastic read; and if you’re still not convinced, I’ll close with two of my favorite passages, on the nature of love:
“At the beginning of all love there is a private treaty each of the lovers makes with himself or herself, an agreement to set aside what is wrong with the other for the sake of what is right. Love is spring after winter. It comes to heal life’s wounds, inflicted by the unloving cold. When that warmth is born in the heart the imperfections of the beloved are as nothing, less than nothing, and the secret treaty with oneself is easy to sign. The voice of doubt is stilled. Later, when love fades, the secret treaty looks like folly, but if so, it’s a necessary folly, born of lovers’ belief in beauty, which is to say, in the possibility of the impossible thing, true love.”
“‘Only with God,’ Ghazali replied. ‘That was and is my only lover, and he is and was more than enough.’”
You’ll get everything with Rushdie’s book: laughter, horror, entertainment, history, memorable characters, and, mostly, lovely language and a story you won’t ever forget.
