Two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights add up to 1001 nights, which is roughly the amount of time it took me to read this book.
Now, that doesn't necessarily make it a bad book; in fact, I enjoyed it a lot (for the most part). It was a peculiar experience because at times it felt like picking it up was a chore, but once I continued reading, I would have a hard time putting it down and though at no point I felt like giving up on it, I did sometimes wish that it would hurry up and end. 3.5 stars it is, then.
I still maintain that it's a good book.
The book revolves around Dunia, a female jinn, who is infatuated with humans and decides to live among them and even falls in love with one of them, the philosopher Ibn Rushd. Together, they have dozens of children and they live a somewhat happy life... until two years, eight months and twenty-eight nights since they first met, Ibn Rushd disappears from her life and leaves Dunia to care for her children on her own. After a while, a heartbroken Dunia returns to Peristan, her world of origin, and the doors between both worlds close.
Fast forward a thousand years when a storm strikes New York City and the strangenesses start happening...
I loved the way this book was written in a sort of run-on, stream of consciousness kind of way because it was very different from anything I'd ever read before, though at times, it did make it really hard to follow certain trains of thought and I would have to go back several sentences to try and figure out where it all was going. It made it a challenge to really pay attention to the story or I would miss several plot points; a challenge that I wasn't always willing to take on, but fun nonetheless!
I also enjoyed the way Salman Rushdie very effortlessly weaved magic into the real world to the point where it didn't seem very far-fetched that sure, there's another world out there full of jinn.
What disappointed me about this book was that, at the heart of it, it was just a typical story of a war between good and evil fueled by love, lust and greed, where good inevitably triumphs over evil and things return to their new normal. That's it, that's the moral of the story. It seemed too simple a resolution when the buildup had been so crazy and fantastic, and I was left hating the ending of yet another book!
I might read this book again eventually (probably when I'm not fatigued after reading a 1000-pages book in two weeks!!!) and my opinion might change. I'll also get to see Salman Rushdie speak in a couple of weeks, so that will probably give me some new insight on this book and its meaning.
For now, I'll remain undecided on whether the good outweighs the bad or viceversa and I'll still recommend it to anyone who might be curious about how the love of a silly jinnia for a mere human sparked the War of the Worlds.
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