Greatly Reviewed!

Master of the Jinn by Irving Karchmar, in my opinion, is a new thing in the tradition of sufi. If to this day we’ve only known about sufi poetry, such as that by El Jalaluddin Rumi (as translated by Anne Marie Schimmel), following your reading of Master of the Jinn you’ll know the so-called ’sufi novel’. Well, is this labeling appropriate? Prove it later sooner or later. I won’t bother concluding its decorum too soon. I don’t have a deadline to meet, right? I’ll just try to peel the novel layer by layer. Soon enough, when I feel sure enough, I’ll tell you what I’ve got to say about the labeling.

Reading the first half of the story, I can’t help comparing this novel with that written by Tucker Malarkey, Resurrection. Yeah, you can find similar elements in both: researchers, manuscripts (a tablet in Resurrection’s case and a scroll in Master’s case), African dessert, religious discussion, and … an open-interpretable histories (that of Jesus in Malarkey’s novel and that of Solomon in Karchmar’s masterpiece). We can say that both are on the same track in this case, I mean in the case of search of answers to mythico-historical believes. Well, figuratively speaking, both are similar trains on side-by-side trains, but their fuels are essentially different—which of course result in quite different smokes.

That’s my first impression of Master of the Jinn (btw, the Indonesian version is entitled “Sang Raja Jin”, and thanks to Salahuddin Gz, I can enjoy the book and have been enlightened by most of its pages). No worries, we’ll dig deeper in no time, as soon as I finish my second reading.