Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights (Rushdie) - Book Reviews

Book Reviews
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is replete with fantastical creatures, scary monsters, very bad men (or rather, male jinns/genies) and one heroic woman.... While Rushdie has written hyped up sagas of worlds colliding before, and always espouses reason over fanaticism, there is something so loopy, so unleashed, about this tale as to make it particularly thrilling.
New York Daily News


In these nested, swirling tales, Rushdie conjures up a whole universe of jinn slithering across time and space, meddling in human affairs and copulating like they’ve just been released from twenty years in a lamp.... Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights translates the bloody upheavals of our last few decades into the comic-book antics of warring jinn wielding bolts of fire, mystical transmutations and rhyming battle spells.
Washington Post


Splendid and heartfelt.... There’s an abundance of authorial winking here, the unabashed symbolism and double entendres quickly stacking up in a manner that wires Rushdie into an ancient storytelling tradition without preventing him from maintaining his own claim on originality and freshness.... Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights will be welcomed with a pure and generous affection by many, rather than the shock and awe of some of Rushdie’s earlier works.
Boston Globe


This is Rushdie’s first [novel] for adults since 2008, and he seems to be having fun with the adult content. He works in jokes about the sexual appetites of his jinn, brings alive dark corners of Manhattan, explores misplaced love, and creates a good-versus-evil battle that’s firmly grounded in phil;osophy.... Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is erudite without flaunting it, an amusement park of a pulpy disaster novel that resists flying out of control by being grounded by religion, history, culture and love.
Los Angeles Times


[Salman] Rushdie is our Scheherazade, inexhaustibly enfolding story within story and unfolding tale after tale with such irrepressible delight that it comes as a shock to remember that, like her, he has lived the life of a storyteller in immediate peril.... This book is a fantasy, a fairytale—and a brilliant reflection of and serious meditation on the choices and agonies of our life in this world.... I like to think how many readers are going to admire the courage of this book, revel in its fierce colors, its boisterousness, humor and tremendous pizzazz, and take delight in its generosity of spirit.
Ursula K. Le Guin - Guardian (UK)


The title adds up to 1,001 nights, an allusion to the story of Scheherazade, and although there are not 1,001 strands of story here, there are many, and they are colourful and compelling.... Rushdie displays the wry humour that helped make Midnight’s Children such a masterpiece.
Independent (UK)


A comic novel about Medieval Islamic philosophy, fairies and the near end of the world may sound difficult. Rushdie’s brilliance is in the balance between high art and pop culture.... This is a novel of both intellectual heft and sheer reading pleasure—a rare feat.
St. Louis Post-Dispatch


There are monsters who slip through wormholes, or slits between worlds; there are battles and set pieces, in Fairyland and on Earth; there are sometimes ridiculous, sometimes hilarious comic turns; stories within stories; riddles within tales within legends. And there is Salman Rushdie, manic Scheherazade, assuming all the voices, playing all the parts, making a mad kind of sense of it all.
Minneapolis Star Tribune


A boisterous novel of ideas, a spirited manifesto for reason disguised as a tale of a jinn war lasting exactly two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights, or 1,001 nights.... What results is hallmark Rushdie: a composite of magic realism, mythology, science fiction and straight-up fantasy.... Like the best Rushdie novels, Two Years is playful and inventive, and also intellectually bracing.
Toronto Globe and Mail


(Starred review.) In his latest novel, Rushdie (Joseph Anton) invents his own cultural narrative—one that blends elements of One Thousand and One Nights, Homeric epics, and sci-fi and action/adventure comic books.... [A]n intellectual treasure chest cleverly disguised as a comic pop-culture apocalyptic caprice.
Publishers Weekly


Most readers will overlook Rushdie's not-so-subtle scolding in this rollicking magical realist adventure, which is fast paced and accessible. It can be enjoyed as a fairy-tale adventure, literary fiction, or a political allegory for our times. —Pamela Mann, St. Mary's Coll. Lib., MD
Library Journal


(Starred review.) [A] rambunctious, satirical, and bewitching metaphysical fable, perhaps [Rushdie's] most thoroughly enjoyable to date.... Rushdie is having wickedly wise fun here. Every character has a keenly hilarious backstory, and the action...[is] exuberantly madcap, magical, and genuinely emotional.... [A] delectable update of One Thousand and One Nights.
Booklist


(Starred review.) Rushdie turns in a sometimes archly elegant, sometimes slightly goofy fairy tale...for grown-ups: "A fairy king," he writes, and he knows whereof he speaks, "can only be poisoned by the most dreadful and powerful of words." Beguiling and astonishing, wonderful and wondrous. Rushdie at his best.
Kirkus Reviews