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kittybetty 's review for:
Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
by Salman Rushdie
Rushdie spins a good yarn. Though he often pauses to card the wool of lengthy and dry exposition, every time he gets that yarn spinning again that’s forgiven.
Less forgivable are his frequent falls into sexism. Old Uncle Salman has an idea of gender and sexuality that came from the 20th century. Of course sexism’s roots are buried far earlier, and it would be great if it could go back to the antediluvian ditches of despotism whence it came, but this is not a story of time travel. It is a magical realistic story and travel between realities happens, but unfortunately, no outmoded ways of thinking are really sent back to their origins, optimistic epilogue notwithstanding. We have to wait for time to accomplish change in its usual way, transforming individuals or gradually removing them from our presence. Since I don’t look forward to the day when we lose this brilliant storyteller, I hope he’ll be transformed and suddenly become able to see and squirm at the sexism that saturates his stories.
But if you’re feeling strong, in that kinda mood where Maria could sing, “Tonight, tonight,” and you wouldn’t want to yell at her for hanging all her hopes for happiness on one dumb boy instead of getting out and having an actual life tonight, but you’re strong enough to just say yeah, dumb part of the story but let’s get on with the story all the same… if you can let the outmoded role off your back like duck’s water, then enjoy Salman’s spinning, letting the snags slide by. I just think a book written in this millennium ought to do better.
The sad outmoded attitudes are so securely snagged and woven into the story, it’s hard to pick out one thread as an example, but here’s a random phrase: “But at least there had been no physical or sexual violence…,” Salman writes of one period, in one place, in his novel. That is a strange little “or.” He goes on, “…no one had been killed or raped….” So, in case we would have assumed that by “sexual violence” he meant non-physical sexual violence, no, there’s the clarification, rape. Well, violence of any kind has psychological as well as physical effects, and it’s all bound up together, but while rape is psychological as well as physical torture, in what sense could rape be seen as not physical? Sorry for my convoluted phraseology there. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around what Rushdie was thinking when he wrote, "no physical or sexual violence." Probably he didn't see what was wrong with his own sentence.
As for consensual sex in this book, it includes a powerful jinn male “being serviced by his cohort,” of females. What the females, the jinnia, desire isn’t important. We’ve already been told they can be bought, these females, despite the fact that they themselves are powerful enough presumably to obtain any wealth they might want without having to perform —- I mean, right? In a society of all-powerful beings, can there be real prostitution?
Yes, alas, it’s all two opposing genders. And I do mean opposing. “Man is born afraid. Of the dark. Of the unknown. Of strangers. Of failure. And of women.” Although Rushdie places these words in the mouth of a “dark ifrit” rather than his more evolved narrator, he does nothing to refute them.
And then there’s homosexuality. Actually, no, there isn’t. Nobody seems to be gay. Wait, I spoke too soon. We meet no lesbians, but we are told in passing that some lesbian sex is tolerated by the jinn. And then we briefly meet one token gay jinn, useless for fighting but useful as a spy, who makes a brief appearance or two--just walk-ons--and is quickly sent away, flamboyance unharmed, when things are about to get really ugly.
One fighter avenges crimes against women, but she’s a “bad girl.” Would it even be a spoiler to guess she’ll come to a bad end? And as for a forgettable philosopher who seems to exist only to be wealthy, desirable, and mildly endangered—right up through the 1000th night she’s introduced not only in scene after scene but multiple times within a scene as “the lady philosopher,” although “philosopher” is not a gendered title, because of course without her being mentioned again as The Lady Philosopher (or once she’s partnered off, as “His Lady Philosopher”), we might otherwise forget who she was.
Lip service is paid to women’s rights and briefly even to gender reassignment of sorts, as theoretical possibilities, but lip service is all. No tongue and definitely no muscle. Ew. Sorry for those two icky sentences. It’s the book talking.
So, creepy old Uncle Salman tells a great, sweeping story, but I’m not looking to him for my bedtime story and he sure enough ain’t gonna tuck me in. I'm going to go read a book by a woman, about a woman, for everyone.
Less forgivable are his frequent falls into sexism. Old Uncle Salman has an idea of gender and sexuality that came from the 20th century. Of course sexism’s roots are buried far earlier, and it would be great if it could go back to the antediluvian ditches of despotism whence it came, but this is not a story of time travel. It is a magical realistic story and travel between realities happens, but unfortunately, no outmoded ways of thinking are really sent back to their origins, optimistic epilogue notwithstanding. We have to wait for time to accomplish change in its usual way, transforming individuals or gradually removing them from our presence. Since I don’t look forward to the day when we lose this brilliant storyteller, I hope he’ll be transformed and suddenly become able to see and squirm at the sexism that saturates his stories.
But if you’re feeling strong, in that kinda mood where Maria could sing, “Tonight, tonight,” and you wouldn’t want to yell at her for hanging all her hopes for happiness on one dumb boy instead of getting out and having an actual life tonight, but you’re strong enough to just say yeah, dumb part of the story but let’s get on with the story all the same… if you can let the outmoded role off your back like duck’s water, then enjoy Salman’s spinning, letting the snags slide by. I just think a book written in this millennium ought to do better.
The sad outmoded attitudes are so securely snagged and woven into the story, it’s hard to pick out one thread as an example, but here’s a random phrase: “But at least there had been no physical or sexual violence…,” Salman writes of one period, in one place, in his novel. That is a strange little “or.” He goes on, “…no one had been killed or raped….” So, in case we would have assumed that by “sexual violence” he meant non-physical sexual violence, no, there’s the clarification, rape. Well, violence of any kind has psychological as well as physical effects, and it’s all bound up together, but while rape is psychological as well as physical torture, in what sense could rape be seen as not physical? Sorry for my convoluted phraseology there. I'm still trying to wrap my mind around what Rushdie was thinking when he wrote, "no physical or sexual violence." Probably he didn't see what was wrong with his own sentence.
As for consensual sex in this book, it includes a powerful jinn male “being serviced by his cohort,” of females. What the females, the jinnia, desire isn’t important. We’ve already been told they can be bought, these females, despite the fact that they themselves are powerful enough presumably to obtain any wealth they might want without having to perform —- I mean, right? In a society of all-powerful beings, can there be real prostitution?
Yes, alas, it’s all two opposing genders. And I do mean opposing. “Man is born afraid. Of the dark. Of the unknown. Of strangers. Of failure. And of women.” Although Rushdie places these words in the mouth of a “dark ifrit” rather than his more evolved narrator, he does nothing to refute them.
And then there’s homosexuality. Actually, no, there isn’t. Nobody seems to be gay. Wait, I spoke too soon. We meet no lesbians, but we are told in passing that some lesbian sex is tolerated by the jinn. And then we briefly meet one token gay jinn, useless for fighting but useful as a spy, who makes a brief appearance or two--just walk-ons--and is quickly sent away, flamboyance unharmed, when things are about to get really ugly.
One fighter avenges crimes against women, but she’s a “bad girl.” Would it even be a spoiler to guess she’ll come to a bad end? And as for a forgettable philosopher who seems to exist only to be wealthy, desirable, and mildly endangered—right up through the 1000th night she’s introduced not only in scene after scene but multiple times within a scene as “the lady philosopher,” although “philosopher” is not a gendered title, because of course without her being mentioned again as The Lady Philosopher (or once she’s partnered off, as “His Lady Philosopher”), we might otherwise forget who she was.
Lip service is paid to women’s rights and briefly even to gender reassignment of sorts, as theoretical possibilities, but lip service is all. No tongue and definitely no muscle. Ew. Sorry for those two icky sentences. It’s the book talking.
So, creepy old Uncle Salman tells a great, sweeping story, but I’m not looking to him for my bedtime story and he sure enough ain’t gonna tuck me in. I'm going to go read a book by a woman, about a woman, for everyone.