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3.25 AVERAGE
3.25 AVERAGE
Plus: Being forcefed interpretations of what I'm reading throughout is not sexy.
Ve zkratce jde o to, že po jedné obrovské bouřce dojde k prolomení bariéry mezi naším světem a světem bájných džinů. Ti se dostanou do naší dimenze. Nejdříve dochází k různým nadpřirozeným nehodám, taškařicím a zlomyslnostem. Ale brzy se vše změní nejen ve velkolepou válku některých džinů proti lidem (kteří nemají moc šancí) ale i ve válku jedněch džinů s druhými. Zákony fyziky se hroutí jako domeček z karet a sním i všechny jistoty, zvyklosti a morálka.
Everything is relative, one man’s absolute belief is another man’s fairy tale.
Our lives are stories encased in a giant Matryoshka doll. An endless saga of happenings that jumps narration from one brand of mystery to the next bland stamp in the potpourri of the decaying universe. Our timelines cross each other’s endlessly entwining with the myriad strangenesses that are our stories: our individual stories, the stories of the street we grew up on, our family stories, and so on. Human beings are but ‘disintegrating clods of earth’ and life a brief respite from nothingness. Reality is a fiction written by each individual, so fantasy is real and the material is fantasy. We are all Sheherazades and our lives are built on a loop of two years,eight months and twenty eight days, or if you will : a thousand and one night.
Set in a comical counterpart of New York City, this giant hotch potch of a fantasy is a love letter to the unlikely heroes. Duniazat (the tribe of the world), the descendants of Dunia who is the grand princess of the Jinniri and is in possession of the magic of lightning, has the audacious distinction of being born without earlobes. The story unfolds as a cataclysmic storm breaks over the city and heralds an era of strangenesses. Among these remove from the normal,the most potent perhaps and definitely the most important is Geronimo Manezes, a gardnener born in Mumbai who loses contact with the earth. He starts levitating. As the distance between him and the terra grows, so do the incidences of strangenesses start multiplying. There is a baby found abandoned at the doorstep of the Mayor’s who can reveal corruption by the touch. Then there is also the nose that is found strolling down the street perfectly free and wily, now that it didn’t have his master’s eyes looking down on him nomore. It is the best of times and it is the worst of times.
The Matryoshka doll of narratives in this fantastical retelling of the Thousand and One Nights by an unknown, unnamed Schererazade, pits reason against religion and performs the oldest war of all times, the simplest and the ultimately the best of all: good versus evil. As the slits between Peristan(fairyland) and Earth open up, jinnis venture into the human world. Now much is known of the Jinnis in legend (but previously discarded by our ancestors as mere ‘stories’. What do they know. Pfft!) but most conspicuously that engage in endless carnal relations all the hours of the day and without prejudice, even relative to the family tree and because they are whimsical beings having no form they despise the humans with their endless striving towards destiny, structure, etc etc. Thus, the two legged inhabitants of the lower world become their battleground as the good jinnis fight the bad and the humans become their best field tests.
As comical and fantastical as the story might seem at first, it isn’t hard to derive the inspirations behind the stories rooted in this material world. The financial breakdown, religious extremism, the disgrace of the philosopher. All of these prove that the story might not be as far off the tangent as it looks at first sight. In here, Rushdie pulls the unreal and the real into a single idea of coherence. The discord between our real past and the imagined history is playfully narrated and his direction on the matter of religion as on the point as ever. In the battle between the Jinns and the two dead philosophers, religion and reason cross swords and as much as his own beliefs might veer one way, the argument to be made in favour is left quite open. He discusses the matter of good versus evil, by way of the dark Jinn being able to influence man by whispering into their hearts. Whereas the good Jinn can also bend humans to their will, the power of the dark is more potent. Is it because the humans are more attuned ready to fall over to the dark side, is left for the readers to decide.
“Our group takes what I'll call a Post-Atheist stance. Our position is that god is a creation of human beings, who only exists because of the clap-hands-if-you-believe-in-fairies principle. If enough people were sensible enough not to clap hands, then this Tinker Bell god would die. However, unfortunately, billions of human beings are still prepared to defend their belief in some sort of god-fairy, and, as a result, god exists. What’s worse is that he is now running amok.”
However,Two Years... is not a tale of doom. Whereas a dystopian ficton could easily have been the result of this tale, rather it is a tale of the triumph of good nature and the simple heroes who save the day. In the world churned by catasptropic events , it might even call for the insignificant individual to dare to raise arms against the mighty Ifrits and dispel darkness. After all isn’t that what most fantasy tales, graphic novels and simply stories tell? Of the simple man who wakes up one day and finds the fate of the world in his hands. Of the unlikely hero to save the day. I love stories that boil down to this simplistic detail.
“The enemy is stupid. That is ground for hope. There is no originality in tyrants, and they learn nothing from the demise of their precursors. They will be brutal and stifling and engender hatred and destroy what men love and that will defeat them. All important battles are, in the end, conflicts between hatred and love, and we must hold to the idea that love is stronger than hate."
