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3.24 AVERAGE
3.24 AVERAGE
This could have made a really good short story. Unfortunately it was a decent short story interspersed with unbearable amounts of rambling
3.5 stars - Metaphorosis Reviews
Summary
A dead philosopher wins a battle with a live one, but their feud continues after both have long been dust. The gap between this world and Fairyland re-opens after a long closure. Compelled by an ancient promise and their own cupidity, Zumurrud the djinn and his cohort sew fear and chaos in the human world. Only the descendants of one of the philosophers and his djinnia wife can save our world.
Review
I haven't read very much of Salman Rushdie's work - Midnight's Children and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I don't recall either particularly well. I came to this book then, uncertain what to expect. I didn't expect, certainly, what Rushdie hints at - that he's an aficionado of Golden Age SF. It doesn't show particularly in the novel; it's just one of the many interesting bits Rushdie drops throughout the book.
If there's one thing that comes clear from this book (let's call it 1,001 Nights for short), it's that Salman Rushdie is erudite. He's an intellectual, one of the intelligentsia, the literati, the highbrow. 1,001 Nights is positively brimming with erudition, with references from Simak to Phytophthora to Veblen, and all sorts of stops in between. Rushdie is a man who's clearly read a lot, thinks a lot, and brings it all into play in his writing. Happily and somewhat surprisingly, all these references don't come across as pretentious or affected. One gets the impression that these are things he draws on not to show off, but because he genuinely knows about them.
All this intelligence and knowledge is helped by a consistent sly, dry humor cropping up at odd moments. Rushdie doesn't take himself or his characters too seriously, even when writing about serious matters. And serious matters there certainly are - there are multiple levels of parable and meta-reference in this story, but Rushdie comes out pretty clearly with several. First, religion is more harmful than helpful, and we'll be better off when we give it up, even if that comes with a cost. Second, and related, humans are flawed, but we can and should work for a world driven by reason, tolerance, and knowledge rather than one driven by fear and faith. (And we can't trust scholars too much.)
Sadly, a positive message, dry humor, and undeniable intelligence are also undercut by dense prose, many meandering asides, and a story that, overall, is fairly dull. The writing is intriguing on an intellectual level, and good in small doses. As a story, though, 1,001 Nights is not a success. Despite grand stakes and battles of good and evil, with humanity in the balance, there's no real emotional component to the story. There are too many characters floating around, and most of them distant. Rushdie makes an effort to center the story on Geronimo (Rafael Hieronymus) the gardener, but I never developed any real interest in him. He and the other characters were too evidently set furniture for a clever but bloodless parable.
In all, a dense intellectual exercise that fails as a story. Interesting to read, but not really amusing.
Received free copy of book in exchange for honest review.
Summary
A dead philosopher wins a battle with a live one, but their feud continues after both have long been dust. The gap between this world and Fairyland re-opens after a long closure. Compelled by an ancient promise and their own cupidity, Zumurrud the djinn and his cohort sew fear and chaos in the human world. Only the descendants of one of the philosophers and his djinnia wife can save our world.
Review
I haven't read very much of Salman Rushdie's work - Midnight's Children and Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I don't recall either particularly well. I came to this book then, uncertain what to expect. I didn't expect, certainly, what Rushdie hints at - that he's an aficionado of Golden Age SF. It doesn't show particularly in the novel; it's just one of the many interesting bits Rushdie drops throughout the book.
If there's one thing that comes clear from this book (let's call it 1,001 Nights for short), it's that Salman Rushdie is erudite. He's an intellectual, one of the intelligentsia, the literati, the highbrow. 1,001 Nights is positively brimming with erudition, with references from Simak to Phytophthora to Veblen, and all sorts of stops in between. Rushdie is a man who's clearly read a lot, thinks a lot, and brings it all into play in his writing. Happily and somewhat surprisingly, all these references don't come across as pretentious or affected. One gets the impression that these are things he draws on not to show off, but because he genuinely knows about them.
All this intelligence and knowledge is helped by a consistent sly, dry humor cropping up at odd moments. Rushdie doesn't take himself or his characters too seriously, even when writing about serious matters. And serious matters there certainly are - there are multiple levels of parable and meta-reference in this story, but Rushdie comes out pretty clearly with several. First, religion is more harmful than helpful, and we'll be better off when we give it up, even if that comes with a cost. Second, and related, humans are flawed, but we can and should work for a world driven by reason, tolerance, and knowledge rather than one driven by fear and faith. (And we can't trust scholars too much.)
Sadly, a positive message, dry humor, and undeniable intelligence are also undercut by dense prose, many meandering asides, and a story that, overall, is fairly dull. The writing is intriguing on an intellectual level, and good in small doses. As a story, though, 1,001 Nights is not a success. Despite grand stakes and battles of good and evil, with humanity in the balance, there's no real emotional component to the story. There are too many characters floating around, and most of them distant. Rushdie makes an effort to center the story on Geronimo (Rafael Hieronymus) the gardener, but I never developed any real interest in him. He and the other characters were too evidently set furniture for a clever but bloodless parable.
In all, a dense intellectual exercise that fails as a story. Interesting to read, but not really amusing.
Received free copy of book in exchange for honest review.
"1001 Nights" (I refuse to use the terrible title Rushdie defined) has some redeeming character arcs and mature exploration of fairytale stories. However, the over all narrative development is predictable and the writing not up-to-par with some of Rushdie's other work.
A Jinnia's disparate great great great great great etc. grandchildren get envolved in an epic battle of the worlds. At times it reminded me end-times novels in the Christian tradition of the genre. At other times it reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez's particular brand of magical realism...all while being unmistakably Rusdie.
I enjoyed the book. The characters were appropriately believable and the narration style fit the genre beautifully. Rushdie's syntax always takes me a minute to get through/into, but in this book I didn't really mind.
I enjoyed the book. The characters were appropriately believable and the narration style fit the genre beautifully. Rushdie's syntax always takes me a minute to get through/into, but in this book I didn't really mind.
Every once in a while I read LITERATURE writers who decide to grace genre fiction with their presence. The results are almost always disappointing. Two Years... contained the germ of a good genre fiction book - djinn reappear on earth and the conflict between them and their mostly human descendants (whose powers have been re-awakened by the djinn's presence) mirror the tropes of today's ubiquitous super-hero tales AND to explain the events of the past few years - and then runs from it by claiming it's a history from 1000 years in the future to excuse gaps in the narrative and avoiding the actual super-hero tropes. The narrator is deliberately ambiguous but not unreliable, and hits the same thematic points over and over and over, each clumsily done and with little poetry. The tying of the War of the Worlds against the often invisible, usually destructive and manipulative Djinn to real world events could work, but is too often too cute by half, throwing me out of the narrative every time he winks at you with his 'oh so clever' ideas. The big ideas in the book - that reason is stronger than religion, that love can be better than hate - are not exactly stunningly complicated, but he hammers them repeatedly.
I was reminded at many points of Greg Cox's The_Eugenics_Wars, where he re-frames the conflicts of the 80's and 90's as the titular wars of from Star Trek history. Cox isn't as technically skilled a writer as Rushdie, but unlike Rushdie, Cox doesn't think he's better than the genre he's dabbling in.
I was reminded at many points of Greg Cox's The_Eugenics_Wars, where he re-frames the conflicts of the 80's and 90's as the titular wars of from Star Trek history. Cox isn't as technically skilled a writer as Rushdie, but unlike Rushdie, Cox doesn't think he's better than the genre he's dabbling in.
It's Rushdie so the writing is wonderful. And quite frankly, the ending is stunning.
However, there seems to be a tad too much joy in the descriptions of older men having sex with younger women who are so overwhelmed by the handsomeness of said older men.
And no, the whole backstory does not make the incest any less icky. Sorry, guess I'm a prude.
However, there seems to be a tad too much joy in the descriptions of older men having sex with younger women who are so overwhelmed by the handsomeness of said older men.
And no, the whole backstory does not make the incest any less icky. Sorry, guess I'm a prude.
Though I appreciated the commentaries on modern society and the symbolic representations possessed by each of the characters, the novel was too much a string of stories, told rather than shown. I couldn't connect to the characters and their dire situation, and the cataclysmic fate of the world felt like something that could be resolved by a simple bolt from the Lightning Princess or even her gravity-defying lover.
This book did a beautiful job of blending folklore/fairytale with modern day storytelling. The characters are able to be mystical while still retaining outrightly human traits, which makes them very fun to read and get to know. The book also balances thoughtfulness and comedy well, and I found it easy to consume despite its rather serious subject matter.