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Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty‑Eight Nights by Salman Rushdie - review  Salman Rushdie’s name on the cover of a book comes with baggage. Because of the history of the author’s previous works, there’s the inevitable desire to compare with the old books. Midnight’s Children especially weighs upon all of the author’s work because of the stature of that novel. However, it’s not just comparison but expectation. The reader expects the protagonist to be from the subcontinent and the novel to be peppered with historical and contemporary references. There is the expectation that the novel will reference and compare Eastern and Western histories. The historical fiction is expected to be accompanied by magical realism. These expectations can also weigh in on the evaluation of Rushdie’s new novel. And, if the reader is expecting to find all those things, they won’t be disappointed. Two Years, Eight Months and Twenty‑Eight Nights is an unwieldy name which references ...

Purity The newest novel by Jonathan Franzen is the kind of novel which an author can only write when previous success has occurred. Without that track record of reliability or quality, the editors would have given the book much greater scrutiny. Purity suffers badly from a lack of editing. The main character is nominally the recent college graduate Purity, nicknamed Pip, though the Julian Assange-like figure of Andreas Wolf steals the spotlight as soon as he appears. The best of the entire novel is set in East Berlin and if more of the focus of the novel was spent on Wolf, it’s possible the novel would have been far more entertaining. The parts with Wolf are not without flaws, however, especially as the character’s repeated stating of his devotion to his mother and love for his past partner, are his motivations begins to seem less plausible as the book goes on. The other main character, Tom Aberrant, an editor at Denver Independent, gives us the most emotional parts ...

Midnight’s children Midnight’s Children immediately reminds the reader of two other novels upon reading, One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and The Tin Drum by Gunter Grass. These are two of the major novels of twentieth century literature and foundation works of the genre of magical realism. Midnight’s Children falls comfortably into the same category of importance as these novels. As well as magical realism Midnight’s Children also encompasses several other literary modes such historical fiction and is considered an allegorical novel and a postcolonial novel. Despite the complexity of categorizing, the book itself is not difficult to read. The language and style which Rusdie employs provide an energy which powers the entire story. The allegory is that of the events in India leading up to independence and what follows after. The narrator of the book is Saleem Sinai who was born at the moment India gained independence on August 15 th 1947. He and ot...