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3.25 AVERAGE
3.25 AVERAGE
I found this book so tedious. I really struggled to finish it, but I have a pathological need to finish books that I start, so I slogged through it.
Salman Rushdie is an author of great intelligence and tremendous breadth. In his latest work of fiction for adults, he makes allusions to everything from Baruch Spinoza to 15th century Aristotlean philosophers to Ghostbusters in his quest to see reason prevail over religion. These references come in a fast-paced deluge, often making great leaps in time and space and between reality and a fictional present.
And, really, many of these little vignettes are both funny and poignant. Rushdie levels some not-terribly-subtle shots at the Islamofascists who have long made him the target of a fatwa, for instance, but casting aspersions on their capacity for sleeping with women, virgins in heaven and otherwise.
But ultimately, I think his literary project fails for two reasons.
The first is that he doesn't expend terribly much effort in the creation of his characters, nor does he nurture much of a sense of empathy in the reader about their outcome. Geronimo Manezes, for example, is someone to whom strange and terrible things happen. He wakes up one day to find himself cursed by a djinn such that he floats ever-so-slightly above the ground. Rushdie does on at some length explaining all the ways that floating off the ground would be uncomfortable and inconvenient, even going so far as to imagine a nuanced series of ways that society writ large would react to such a happening.
But what does Geronimo feel about it beyond just... bad? There's very little dialogue and sparse action, so pretty much all of what we know about his internal life is simply told to us by the narrator. His character arc inspires no emotion, because it's just the window-dressing for Rushdie to make larger points.
It all reads like that!
The second reason I don't think he quite pulls the project off is because, while it's sort of supposed to be an argument in favor of reason over religion, it's a completely one-sided conversation. The dark djinn descend on earth from Fairyland and here are all the ways they take advantage of human nature to make humans do terrible things like stone heretics and subjugate women. He ascribes all the worst aspects of real life religion to this fictional cause. And then when that dark cause is defeated, we're led to believe that we'll eventually move on to this age of reason alluded to by his futuristic narrators.
But if the cause of all those horrible human acts is removed, why wouldn't religion revert to a relatively benign social form? Using fear to make people believe in God is certainly one tack that the religious use, but equally prevalent is the embrace of love, no?
And as the 20th century showed time and again, humanity doesn't need the veil of religion to commit unspeakable acts of horror onto one another. Nationalism and science and who knows what other practices can be warped to the pursuit of power and the darkness of the human soul. I don't accept that a benign age of reason is inevitable, mostly because Rushdie doesn't make much of an argument for one.
The book is very clever. Rushdie makes scads of insightful, often hilarious points along the journey. But it's just not a good story. And for a book that leans so directly on the legacy of One Thousand And One Nights, I just don't think it's forgivable.
And, really, many of these little vignettes are both funny and poignant. Rushdie levels some not-terribly-subtle shots at the Islamofascists who have long made him the target of a fatwa, for instance, but casting aspersions on their capacity for sleeping with women, virgins in heaven and otherwise.
But ultimately, I think his literary project fails for two reasons.
The first is that he doesn't expend terribly much effort in the creation of his characters, nor does he nurture much of a sense of empathy in the reader about their outcome. Geronimo Manezes, for example, is someone to whom strange and terrible things happen. He wakes up one day to find himself cursed by a djinn such that he floats ever-so-slightly above the ground. Rushdie does on at some length explaining all the ways that floating off the ground would be uncomfortable and inconvenient, even going so far as to imagine a nuanced series of ways that society writ large would react to such a happening.
But what does Geronimo feel about it beyond just... bad? There's very little dialogue and sparse action, so pretty much all of what we know about his internal life is simply told to us by the narrator. His character arc inspires no emotion, because it's just the window-dressing for Rushdie to make larger points.
Mr. Geronimo's life up to this point had been a journey of a type that was no longer uncommon in our ancestors' peripatetic world, in which people easily became detached from places, beliefs, communities, countries, languages, and from even more important things, such as honor, morality, good judgement, and truth; in which, we may say, they splintered away from the authentic narratives of their life stories and spent the rest of their days trying to discover, or forge, new, synthetic narratives of their own.
It all reads like that!
The second reason I don't think he quite pulls the project off is because, while it's sort of supposed to be an argument in favor of reason over religion, it's a completely one-sided conversation. The dark djinn descend on earth from Fairyland and here are all the ways they take advantage of human nature to make humans do terrible things like stone heretics and subjugate women. He ascribes all the worst aspects of real life religion to this fictional cause. And then when that dark cause is defeated, we're led to believe that we'll eventually move on to this age of reason alluded to by his futuristic narrators.
But if the cause of all those horrible human acts is removed, why wouldn't religion revert to a relatively benign social form? Using fear to make people believe in God is certainly one tack that the religious use, but equally prevalent is the embrace of love, no?
And as the 20th century showed time and again, humanity doesn't need the veil of religion to commit unspeakable acts of horror onto one another. Nationalism and science and who knows what other practices can be warped to the pursuit of power and the darkness of the human soul. I don't accept that a benign age of reason is inevitable, mostly because Rushdie doesn't make much of an argument for one.
The book is very clever. Rushdie makes scads of insightful, often hilarious points along the journey. But it's just not a good story. And for a book that leans so directly on the legacy of One Thousand And One Nights, I just don't think it's forgivable.
This was so much fun! A clever and witty fairytale full of memorable humans and jinns mixing it up and messing with our world. Sometimes I get a little bogged down in Rushdie - but not this one. I started reading the ebook and switched to the audio about 1/3 of the way in.
Briefly, the narrative is interesting and kept me engrossed for two days, but the digressions can be a bit preachy and tedious.
Before you start: two years, eight months, and twenty-eight nights adds up to 1,001 nights. It helps if you know that going in.
So knowing that, it will not come as a surprise to you that this is a book about genies (aka jinni) and mankind, loosely inspired by Arabian Nights and the like.
The bulk of this book is about a giant, earth-shattering battle between jinni and man, between Fairyland and Earth, between irrationality and rationality, between religion and reason. That the jinni are on the side of religion only makes sense because of a philosophical subplot, in which a long-dead philosopher postulates that chaos and violence drive men toward God, and so naturally he enlists the jinni to wreak chaos and violence for that purpose.
The battle itself is fairly entertaining. Humans and superhumans fight and die in interesting ways.
But oh, it takes so long to get to it! I crawwwwwwled through the first twenty percent of the book, uncertain whether I was going to make it through. So if you begin it and find yourself struggling, give it time; it definitely improves as it goes. The pace gets faster, the events get more dramatic, and the philosophizing begins to serve a sort of clearer purpose. In the end, it's worth the read.
One other item bears mentioning: the point of view. At some points it seems like an unremarkable omniscient narrator who gets out of the way of the story he's telling. But at other points, the identity becomes overly apparent and intrudes on the story -- using a royal "we" and explain that some parts of the tale are merely rumor, so "they" can't vouch for their authenticity, it becomes clear that Rushdie is going for a kind of anthropological summary, a [b:World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War|8908|World War Z An Oral History of the Zombie War|Max Brooks|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386328204s/8908.jpg|817]-style history of a long-ago and only partially understood war. I didn't find this nearly as successful as I did in WWZ (which I loved), partly because it seemed inconsistent and partly because of the aforementioned intrusiveness. But, your mileage may vary.
Note: I received a complimentary copy of this ebook from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.
So knowing that, it will not come as a surprise to you that this is a book about genies (aka jinni) and mankind, loosely inspired by Arabian Nights and the like.
The bulk of this book is about a giant, earth-shattering battle between jinni and man, between Fairyland and Earth, between irrationality and rationality, between religion and reason. That the jinni are on the side of religion only makes sense because of a philosophical subplot, in which a long-dead philosopher postulates that chaos and violence drive men toward God, and so naturally he enlists the jinni to wreak chaos and violence for that purpose.
The battle itself is fairly entertaining. Humans and superhumans fight and die in interesting ways.
But oh, it takes so long to get to it! I crawwwwwwled through the first twenty percent of the book, uncertain whether I was going to make it through. So if you begin it and find yourself struggling, give it time; it definitely improves as it goes. The pace gets faster, the events get more dramatic, and the philosophizing begins to serve a sort of clearer purpose. In the end, it's worth the read.
One other item bears mentioning: the point of view. At some points it seems like an unremarkable omniscient narrator who gets out of the way of the story he's telling. But at other points, the identity becomes overly apparent and intrudes on the story -- using a royal "we" and explain that some parts of the tale are merely rumor, so "they" can't vouch for their authenticity, it becomes clear that Rushdie is going for a kind of anthropological summary, a [b:World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War|8908|World War Z An Oral History of the Zombie War|Max Brooks|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1386328204s/8908.jpg|817]-style history of a long-ago and only partially understood war. I didn't find this nearly as successful as I did in WWZ (which I loved), partly because it seemed inconsistent and partly because of the aforementioned intrusiveness. But, your mileage may vary.
Note: I received a complimentary copy of this ebook from the publisher in exchange for my honest review.
I highly HIGHLY recommend Salmon Rushdie's new novel. I'd never read anything by him before and wasn't quite sure what to expect, but the fantasy of the magic and jinniri mixed with the realism of Mr. Geronimo and the society in which he lives is such an intriguing combination. The narrators are something else again. Love it!
Not nearly as good as Midnight's Children, but a good intro to this style, and a more manageable read. Salman Rushdie's writing is a sweet combination of refreshing, mesmerizing, and comforting, and wondrous. This book in particular was refreshing because I read it after some other mediocre fiction...anyway I'd recommend it for the writing over the plot. It's a nice exploration of the jinn and how they interact with the human world, but it all comes to an end pretty quickly after being somewhat drawn out, which seems typical. The writing - the ideas and descriptions and magic - are what make his books worth reading. The debate between ibn Rushd and Ghazali is intriguing, as are the recurring themes of homeland, nostalgia, narratives, identity, and the passage of time.
The primary storyline was interesting, following the jinnia princess and her war. Too often the story derailed, or changed perspective, or narrative voice, or whatever you want to call the choppy method used in this novel. Maybe it just got too high minded and tried too hard to create a unique "philosophy" of life. Had it stuck to the main tale and kept it as a myth, perhaps isolating the lofty "this is our past, but your [the reader's] present" sections to the beginning and end, perhaps that could have prevented the uneven pace. If you can overcome those parts (which are relatively short) or are willing to skim them to get to the juicy bits then it really is a fun myth to imagine.
It started out strong and I was really engaged and about half-way through the writing, I thought, got sloppy and wordy. I began having a hard time keeping focused. I am disappointed that I didn't like the novel more because I really like The Satanic Verses.