Salman Rushdie's Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights opens with Francisco Goya's etching "Los Caprichos #43," also known as The Sleep of Reason Produces Monsters. With effortless grace, author Salman Rushdie slides into his book with a passage about the true nature of jinn, those "creatures made of smokeless fire." And we are off and running. Like Gabriel Garcia Marquez and Mikhail Bulgakov, Rushdie is a master of magical realism who examines the purchase of history — the violence of oppression, the witlessness of silence — through absurdity, beauty, and power struggles. His latest book, like his best, Midnight's Children, finds a group of disparate characters suddenly imbued with strange, often unpleasant powers. The product of a forbidden love, these demi-mortals find the veil between jinn and men has been ruptured, leading to a war of unreason that will span, as the title suggests, a thousand and one nights. Our only regret is that Two Years Eight Months didn't last longer. Where else will you find a writer who weaves together Henry James, Mel Brooks, Baltasar Gracián, and Mickey Mouse? On stage, with Michael Krasny.
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