According to Salman Rushdie’s new novel, most of what we know about genies is wrong, which makes me worry that I may have spent too much time watching Barbara Eden. The harem pants, the wish-granting, that eager “master” talk — turns out, it’s all pure fantasy. “It was extremely unwise to believe that such potent, slippery beings could have masters,” Rushdie writes. And we’re not even using the right term. “The name of the immense force that had entered the world was jinn.”
Those fiery, smokeless creatures soar around every page of Sir Salman’s “Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights,” and if that title sounds like a chore, make your jinni do the math. You’ll get a thousand and one nights, which is this novel’s fantastical inspiration. In these nested, swirling tales, Rushdie conjures up a whole universe of jinn slithering across time and space, meddling in human affairs and copulating like they’ve just been released from 20 years in a lamp.
Tagged: Barbara Eden, harem pants, Rushdie, Salman Rushdie, Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights
