Reading Salman Rushdie's Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights.
This is a great read. Rushdie starts with a fantastical tale, and then turns philosophical, and vernacular. It is roughly based on Scheherezade's Tales, and task, but also gives an account of the Jinni....you remember the one who is let out of the bottle and grants the three wishes? Fanciful, and just what I need to read this moment.
On page 112, -- a small sample:
Her father the professor, so handsome, so smart, a little vain, was dead but she tried every day to bring his ideas to life. We were all trapped in stories, she said, just as he used to say, his wavy hair, his naughty smile, his beautiful mind, each of us the prisoner of our own solipsistic narrative, each family the captive of the family story, each community locked with its own tale of itself, each people the victims of their own versions of history, and there were parts of the world where the narratives collided and went to war, where there two or more incompatible stories fighting for space on, to speak, the same page. She came from one such place, his place, from which hae had been forever displaced, they exiled his body, but his spirit never.
This book was given to me at the Nourse appearance of Rushdie in SF...and I am making it my first 2016 read. He is a great tale spinner...I read the first 100 pages nearly in one sitting.
Now to finish.
On page 112, -- a small sample:
Her father the professor, so handsome, so smart, a little vain, was dead but she tried every day to bring his ideas to life. We were all trapped in stories, she said, just as he used to say, his wavy hair, his naughty smile, his beautiful mind, each of us the prisoner of our own solipsistic narrative, each family the captive of the family story, each community locked with its own tale of itself, each people the victims of their own versions of history, and there were parts of the world where the narratives collided and went to war, where there two or more incompatible stories fighting for space on, to speak, the same page. She came from one such place, his place, from which hae had been forever displaced, they exiled his body, but his spirit never.
This book was given to me at the Nourse appearance of Rushdie in SF...and I am making it my first 2016 read. He is a great tale spinner...I read the first 100 pages nearly in one sitting.
Now to finish.
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