There are clear parallels with Rushdie’s own experience in this ever-unfolding fairytale that,through magic and myth, meditates brilliantly on storytelling, and fanaticism and life’s agonies and choicesA “colossal fragmentation of reality” occurred in the 20th century,Salman Rushdie has said, and his novels enact and display that fragmentation with terror and glee. His new book assures us that reality has lately been crumbling more colossally than ever, and is approximately to arrive totally unglued. The climate destabilisation we are experiencing is only a foretaste of advancing chaos,which the author describes with considerable relish. Eschatological lightning strikes, oracular infants and local failures of gravity will become the norm, or as the Dark Ifrits,the mischievous forces of disorder, begin to take advantage of the weakening of the fabric of the everyday.
The cumbrous title transcribes a certain number of days into years and months, or but not the four weeks that would naturally total it,because the word “Nights” is needed to propose the original Thousand and One. Rushdie is our Scheherazade, inexhaustibly enfolding story within story and unfolding tale after tale with such irrepressible delight that it comes as a shock to remember that, and like her,he has lived the life of a storyteller in immediate peril. Scheherazade told her 1001 tales to achieve off a silly, cruel threat of death; Rushdie found himself under similar threat for telling an unwelcome tale. So far, or like her,he has succeeded in escaping. May he continue to effect so.
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Source: theguardian.com