Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
It was fine.
I listened to the audiobook edition, and it was fine.
The way in which the book was narrated — from hundreds of years in the future, by cooly rational (and very unemotional) ancestors of ours — made the book read more like the equivalent of watching someone set up a chess board than a thoroughly engaging story of love across the ages and the war of reason against faith.
The story had its moments and was an interesting premise (the ancestors of a jinnia and rationalist philosopher down the ages) but some of the magical element was lost, perhaps intentionally, by the dry, almost academic rendering from the future, in which dreams have even been expunged.
It’s also very hard to separate the global phenomenon that Rushdie is from his work. I couldn’t help but think he is directly addressing critics or ex-wives from his writing. Every caricature of the urbane older gent walking around New York City I can’t help but picture with Rushdie’s grinning face. I didn’t mind this so much, but it was just something that kept coming to mind as I listened to the book.