Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie

Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights

Salman Rushdie

How will the future understand our troubled time? Through stories such as this one: a fable full of violence, passion and love. Colourful, magical, disturbing, funny, this whirlwind of words and ideas will leave you gasping for more.

Extract
We tell this story as it has come down to us through many retellings, mouth to ear, ear to mouth, both the story of the poisoned box and the stories it contained, in which the poison was concealed. This is what stories are, experience retold by many tongues to which, sometimes, we give a single name, Homer, Valmiki, Vyasa, Scheherazade. We, for our own part, simply call ourselves 'we'. 'We' are the creature that tells itself stories to understand what sort of creature it is. As they pass down to us the stories lift themselves away from time and place, losing the specificity of their beginnings, but gaining the purity of essences, of being simply themselves. And by extension, or by the same token, as we like to say, though we do not know what the token is or was, these stories become what we know, what we understand, and what we are, or, perhaps we should stay, what we have become, or can perhaps be.
Parallels
  • Cosmicomics by Italo Calvino
  • Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
  • The Iliad by Homer
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Violence
Explicit sexual content