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Activate your digital access. Manage your account settings. My Account Log Out Get the news Log In or Subscribe to skip Sign in with FacebookSign in with GoogleSign in FAQ 18 1 Share This Story! Let friends in your social network know what you are reading about FacebookEmailTwitterGoogle+LinkedInPinterest A postmodern fable from Salman Rushdie Shades of Scheherazade in 'Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.' Loading… Post to Facebook ____________________ ____________________ ____________________ A postmodern fable from Salman Rushdie _____________________ ____________________________________________________________ Shades of Scheherazade in 'Two Years Eight Months and Twent ____________________________________________________________ Check out this story on USATODAY.com: http://usat.ly/1Ft9bk {# IFRAME: http://api.recaptcha.net/noscript?k=6Lf7fuESAAAAAJ3_KMIDbkQySsEE0vMkLXU kq4eY #} CancelSend Sent! A link has been sent to your friend's email address. Posted! A link has been posted to your Facebook feed. A postmodern fable from Salman Rushdie Kevin Nance , Special for USA TODAY 2 p.m. EDT September 27, 2015 Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie (Random House) in General fiction In the near future, after a storm strikes New York City, the 'strangenesses' begins and the worlds of humans and jinn collide Buy Now * Buy Now * Amazon * Barnes & Noble * Google Play * iBooks * Indiebound * Kobo * Zola USA TODAY BEST-SELLING BOOKS # 73 this week # - last week 1 weeks listed # 73 best week Debuted: September 17 2015 USA TODAY Rating As great novelists enter the latter stages of their careers, they can become their own worst enemies, in the sense that each new book is inevitably judged against its predecessors. The slim late volumes of Toni Morrison feel taunted by the weightier, meatier Song of Solomon and Beloved, while Philip Roth’s last few books seem to flutter in the slipstream of The Ghost Writer and American Pastoral. This phenomenon comes to mind in relation to Salman Rushdie’s pleasurably fanciful and, in the context of his body of work, relatively slight new novel, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights. This postmodern fable, in which a roughly contemporary New York becomes a battleground between warring factions of the jinn (amoral, incorrigibly randy magical beings of Arab and Islamic myth), is to Midnight’s Children and The Satanic Verses what Billy Budd is to Moby-Dick, what The Secret Agent is to Heart of Darkness. But second-tier Rushdie is still very good stuff. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights — the number is equivalent to 1,001, which ought to ring a certain bell — riffs and expands on the tales of Scheherazade, another storyteller whose spinning of yarns was a matter of life and death. (It’s a subject that the author, who spent many years in hiding after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini called for his assassination in 1989, knows something about.) The story begins with a real-life philosopher of 12th-century Arab Spain, Ibn Rushd (better known in the West as Averroes), who in this telling becomes the unwitting consort of Dunia, a princess of the jinn who has slipped through the veil that separates her fairy-tale world from ours in the guise of a comely young woman. Their prolific union produces a line of half-human, half-jinn offspring — the “Rushdi,” as the author can’t help calling them — whose descendants, centuries later, form the nucleus of an army marshalled by Dunia in a war between herself and a quartet of dark jinn bent on subduing humanity. Author Salman Rushdie Author Salman Rushdie (Photo: Beowulf Sheehan) This army, mustered after the veil is torn open and a series of “strangenesses” begin to manifest, is a delightful bunch. There’s Mr. Geronimo, a gardener whose feet suddenly insist on remaining a half-inch off the ground, and Jimmy Kapoor, a comic-book artist, one of whose fearsome creations appears to come to life. (“Vow,” he cries when Dunia appears to reveal his ancestry. “It isn’t bad enough being a brown dude in America, you’re telling me I’m half ...goblin as well.”) There’s a female philosopher with a prodigious gift for picking up languages, an infant who can identify corruption at City Hall, and others with odd powers that, as the war of the worlds unfolds, come in handy. That war, as always in Rushdie’s work, is both physical and ideological. The jinn, who are as divided about the nature of reality as humans are, mirror our squabbles pitting religion against reason, miracles against science, natives against immigrants, heterosexuals against homosexuals. That they do so in the context of a cosmic apocalypse is a wicked bit of satire that perhaps only this Indian-born, British-raised, American-transplanted author, so conversant in the language of disaspora, would have attempted. It can’t be said that the characters here possess the roundness and emotional power achieved by those in another recent neo-fable, Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant. Unlike that great book, which is both an impressive intellectual construct and a crackling good story, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights is first and foremost an argument conducted by marionettes manipulated by the barely concealed hands of a master marionettist. Even so, you hang on their every word. Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights By Salman Rushdie Random House, 286 pp. 3 stars out of four Goodreads reviews for Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights IFRAME: http://www.goodreads.com/api/reviews_widget_iframe?did=5005&format=html &header_text=Goodreads+reviews+for+Two%20Years%20Eight%20Months%20and%2 0Twenty-Eight%20Nights&isbn=9780812998917&links=0AF&review_back=fff&sta rs=149CEE&stylesheet=http://www.gannett-cdn.com/static/usat-web-static- 1804.0/css/bundles/books.min.css?v=1804.0&text=000 USA Today's Best-Selling Books List * 1 The Life-Changing Magic of Tidying Up Marie Kondo * 2 The Choice Nicholas Sparks * 3 Spark Joy Marie Kondo * 4 The Girl on the Train Paula Hawkins USA TODAY Review * 5 January: Calendar Girl Book 1 Audrey Carlan USA TODAY's Best-Selling Books List