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

• Early Reviewer edition for LibraryThing.com
• Originally published in 2015
• Indian author
• Epigraph:  
• "Fantasy abandoned by reason produces impossible monsters; united with her, she is the mother of the arts and the origin of their marvels."...(caption to Goya's "Los Caprichos, no.43)
• :One is not a 'believer' in fairy tales.  There is no theology, no body of ogma, no ritual, no institution, no expectation for a form of behavior.  They are about the unexpectedness and mutability of the world."....George Szirtes
• "Instead of making myself write the book I ought to write, the novel that was expected of me, I conjured up the book I myself would have liked to read, the sort by an unknown writer, from another age and another country, discovered in an attic."...Italo Calvino
• "She saw the dawn approach, and fell silent, discreetly."......The Thousand and One Night
• Characters:
• Geronimo: floats off the ground, Dunia's child
• Alexandra Bliss Faina, fodder heiress
• Jimmy Kapoor, graphic novelist who travels into worm hole
• Mayor Rosa Fast, adopted Baby Storm who could detect deception
• "Mac" Aroni....really?
• Notes:
• War of the Worlds, between dark and light jinni and jinnia, parable
• jinn: creatures made of smokeless fire
• the time of strangenesses, lasted two years, eight months and twenty eight nights (1001)
• Dunia, the princess of the light jinn world, warrior who could feel human emotion
• the quest for scapegoats had begun
• reference to President Obama, too level headed for the jinnia (ISIS?)
• Chinese box of stories, bottomless pit of stories
• Peace brought the loss of dreams
• Quotes:
• p.22..."If you walk away from God you should probably try to stay in the good graces of Luck."
• p.47..."Reason could not and would never triumph over savage, undimmed unreason."
• p.55..."Yet in considering that strange era, the era of the two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights which is the subject of the present account, we are forced to concede that the world had become absurd, and that the laws which had long been accepted as the governing principles of reality had collapsed, leaving our ancestors perplexed and unable to fathom what the new laws might be."
• p.57..."A child understands nothing, and clings to faith because it lacks knowledge.  The battle between reason and superstition may be seen as mankind's long adolescence, and the triumph of reason will be its coming of age."
• p.74..."...there are very few cases in which a jinnia bore human children.  That would be as if the breeze were to be impregnated by the hair it ruffled and gave birth to more hair.  That would be as if a story mated with its reader to produce another reader."
• p.75...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."
• p.92..."It was easier to believe that Chance, always the hidden principle of the universe, was joining forces with allegory, symbolism, surrealism and chaos, and taking charge of human affairs, than it was to accept the truth, namely the growing interference of the jinn in the daily life of the world."
• p.101..."...he had begun to grasp the difficult truth that a thing could have a cause, but that was not the same thing as having a purpose."
• p.140..."Beware the man (or jinni) of  action when he finally seeks to better himself with thought.  A little thinking is a dangerous thing."
• 213..."...the practice of extreme violence, known by the catch-all and often inexact term terrorism, was always of particular attraction to male individuals who were either virgins or unable to find sexual partners."
• p.269..."It seems to us self-evident, however, that the use of religion as a justification for repression, horror, tyranny, and even barbarism, a phenomenon which undoubtedly predated the War of the Worlds but was certainly a significant aspect of that conflict, led in the end to the terminal disillusion of the human race with the idea of faith."
• p.274..."The doors of perception opened and he saw that what was evil and monstrous about the jinn was a mirror of the monstrous and evil part of human beings, that human nature too contained the same irrationality, wanton, willful, malevolent, and cruel, and that the battle against the inn was a portrait of the battle within the human heart, which meant that the jinn were somehow abstractions as well as realities, and that their descent to the lower world served to show that world unreason which was the name of the dark jinn within people, and as he understood this, he also understood Teresa Saca's self-hatred, and knew, as she knew, that the jinn self within them both needed to be expunged, the irrational in man as well as jinn had to be defeated, so that an age of reason could begin."
• p.286..."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, and the darkness in us, which drove the theater of the night, is soothed."
• Review:  Once again, Salman Rushdie cuts loose his verbal bombardment, leaving the reader gasping for breath, reeling from the word rush, and jumping for joy at the author's combination of wit and wisdom.  Come witness the War of the Worlds, the battle for peace and power, and don't miss the blatant references to contemporary issues and public figures.  It seems Rushdie wants the reader to be a child who is terrified and then soothed by a fairy tale.  Perhaps he even wants the reader to step back, breathe deeply, and get some perspective on the events on our planet, our priorities, and our problems.  A magnificent fairy tale for the erudite.