The Washington Post sums up general sentiment: If one can overlook its flaws, The Enchantress of Florence is âso delightful an homage to Renaissance magic and wonder.â Rushdie combines his trademark mix of fantasy and reality in his exploration of East and West, power, love, loyalty, religion, humanism, and imagination. While many critics described the writing as sensual, evocative, and dreamy, and the portraitsâ"Niccolò Machiavelli, Savonarola, and the Medicisâ"as intriguing, other reviewers were not so generous. A few faulted Rushdieâs mechanical storytelling, flat figures, over-the-top research, and self-indulgent digressions. But readers who focus on the wonder of the story rather than the particulars wonât be disappointed. As the Cleveland Plain Dealer notes: âIdeas and what we imagine have as much power over our lives as the tangible stuff, Rushdie seems to be telling us. They are both the basis of the modern world, this fable gently reminds, and its terrible bane.â
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
*Starred Review* Rushdie spins a tall tale based on the hoary premise of a stranger coming to town. Town in this instance is the capital city of the Mogul Empire of Akbar the Great—Rushdie chooses well in writing a historical novel centered on one of the most fascinating rulers in the history of East Asia—and the stranger is a Florentine conjurer who has come all the way from Italy to seek an audience with the king of kings, for he has a story fit only for the emperor’s ears. The stranger, attractive on many levels—“He has picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague”—ingratiates himself into court life, having a keen admirer in the emperor himself. Copious detail about the history of the Mogul and Ottoman Empires leads to reader edification but, at the same time, can lead to reader impatience; nevertheless, as always, Rushdie furnishes the world of his fiction in lush upholstery. He is uninterested in keeping his narrative tightly tethered to reality; the magical level it carries so robustly imbues it with the atmosphere of a fable. It’s an elaborate, complicated read, intensely reflective of the author’s worldliness, intelligence, and partiality to the fantastical. This novel is best sipped, because it’s a heady brew, but it is also entertainment of the highest literary order. --Brad Hooper
Review
“A romance of beauty and power from Italy to India . . . so delightful an homage to Renaissance magic and wonder.”
–Michael Dirda, The Washington Post Book World
“This is ‘history’ jubilantly mixed with postmodernist magic realism.”
–Joyce Carol Oates, The New York Review of Books
“A baroque whirlwind of a narrative . . . [Rushdie helps] us escape from the present into a dreamlike past that ultimately makes us more aware of the dangers and illusions of our everyday lives.”
–Alan Cheuse, Chicago Tribune
“Brilliant . . . Rushdie’s sumptuous mixture of history and fable is magnificent.”
–Ursula K. Le Guin, The Guardian (London)
“For Rushdie, as for the artists he writes about, the pen is a magician’s wand. . . . One of his best [novels].”
–John Sutherland, Financial Times
“[A] prodigious fever dream of a book.”
–Lisa Shea, Elle
“Beyond its magical razzle-dazzle lays a work of steely contemporary resonance, rich in slyly metafictional allusions.”
–Hephzibah Anderson, Bloomberg News
From the Trade Paperback edition.
About the Author
Salman Rushdie is the author of nine previous novels: Grimus; Midnight’s Children (which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 and, in 1993, was judged to be the “Booker of Bookers,” the best novel to have won that prize in its first twenty-five years); Shame (winner of the French Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger); The Satanic Verses (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel); Haroun and the Sea of Stories (winner of the Writers Guild Award); The Moor’s Last Sigh (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel); The Ground Beneath Her Feet (winner of the Eurasian section of the Commonwealth Prize); Fury (a New York Times Notable Book); and Shalimar the Clown (a Time Book of the Year). He is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and three works of nonfiction– Imaginary Homelands, The Jaguar Smile, and The Wizard of Oz. He is co-editor of Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian writing.
From The Washington Post
Reviewed by Michael Dirda
Despite his liking for fairy tale and fantasy, Salman Rushdie is usually, and rightly, perceived as a Serious Nobel Prize-Worthy Writer. So it may come as a surprise that he has produced a book that is the equivalent of a summer fling. Set during the 16th century, The Enchantress of Florence is altogether ramshackle as a novel -- oddly structured, blithely mixing history and legend and distinctly minor compared to such masterworks as The Moor's Last Sigh and Midnight's Children -- and it is really not a novel at all. It is a romance, and only a dry-hearted critic would dwell on the flaws in so delightful an homage to Renaissance magic and wonder.
In these languid, languorous pages, the Emperor Akbar the Great dreams his ideal mistress into existence, a Florentine orphan rises to become the military champion of Islam, and a black-eyed beauty casts a spell on every man who sees her. Other characters include Machiavelli and Botticelli, Amerigo Vespucci, Adm. Andrea Doria and Vlad the Impaler (a.k.a. Dracula), not to discount various Medicis and the principal members of the Mughal court of Sikri, India. The action itself covers half the known world: the seacoast of Africa, the Indian subcontinent, the battlefields of the Middle East, Renaissance Italy and the newly discovered New World.
Yet whatever the locale, The Enchantress of Florence is bathed throughout in Mediterranean sunlight and Oriental sensuousness. Its atmosphere derives from the Italian Renaissance epic, especially Ariosto's magic-filled Orlando Furioso, and from such latter-day reveries of Eastern splendor as Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities (which features Marco Polo and Akbar's grandfather Kublai Khan).
Here, then, is a gorgeous 16th century that never quite was, except in operas, masques and ballets. In such a world, a spying eunuch named Umar the Ayyar can move invisibly through crowds and "see everything, including some things that hadn't happened yet." For The Enchantress of Florence celebrates a vanished world "before the real and unreal were segregated forever and doomed to live apart under different monarchs and separate legal systems."
The first third of Rushdie's romance focuses on an enigmatic rogue of many names as he makes his way to the court of Akbar the Great in India. Much earlier, this "Uccello," this "Mogor dell'Amore," set forth "to see the world, taking ship hither and yon, sometimes as a member of the crew, on other occasions as a carefree stowaway, learned many languages, acquired a wide variety of skills, not all of them within the boundaries of the law, and accumulated his own tales to tell, tales of escapes from cannibalism in Sumatra and of the egg-sized pearls of Brunei and of fleeing from the Great Turk up the Volga to Moscow in winter and of crossing the Red Sea in a dhow held together with string." But about himself this mysterious voyager "would only say to the men and women he met on his voyages that his story was stranger by far than any of these tales."
After he reaches Sikri, the capital city by the golden lake, Mogor dell'Amore risks his life to ingratiate himself with the Emperor -- but for what purpose? In due course, he does unfold a fantastic tale about his ancestry and about a secret Mughal princess named Qara Köz. The latter two-thirds of the novel take up this wondrous beauty's adventures in the Middle East and Florence, as Qara Köz -- eventually renamed Angelica -- conquers the heart of one bloody conqueror after another. She is every man's lubricious dream, at once princess, slave and witch, and willing to do whatever it takes to please her current lord and to survive. Her sole companion is a servant girl called the Mirror, only a tad less beautiful than her mistress, and the sharer of her bed.
In many ways The Enchantress of Florence is a dream of fair women, a portrait gallery of heartbreaking beauty. In Italy, for instance, there is Simonetta Vespucci (the model for Botticelli's "Birth of Venus") as well as the courtesan Alessandra Fiorentina:
"He caught a glimpse through an idly open door of La Fiorentina in her private sanctum, reclining on a gilded chaise in the midst of a small group of the city's very finest men, and idly permitting her patron Francesco del Nero to kiss her left breast while a little hairy white lapdog licked at her right nipple, and in that instant he was done for, and knew that she was the only woman for him."
But the Italians are rivaled, even surpassed, by the Indian sirens. Khanzada Begum is universally acknowledged -- at least by all her servants and courtiers -- as the most beautiful woman in the world, until Qara Köz, i.e. Black Eyes, is born. "From that day forward, Khanzada noticed a change in the timbre of her daily adoration, which began to contain a higher level of insincerity than was acceptable." And then there's Jodha, the Emperor's fantasy come to life. Among her myriad erotic skills, she is consummately adept at "the seven types of unguiculation, which is to say the art of using the nails to enhance the act of love." (Rushdie cites examples of the seven types, all clearly derived from the Kama Sutra -- book two, chapter four, if you're int
erested.) As Jodha says, "When a boy dreams up a woman he gives her big breasts and a small brain. . . . When a king imagines a wife he dreams of me."
While The Enchantress of Florence mainly lingers in the memory as a paean to the power of beauty, it is also a meditation on power, tout court. The world can turn against beauty, just as it can turn against intelligence or spiritual conviction or noble ideals. Machiavelli -- soon to write The Prince -- warns the Mughal princess: "This is Florence, my lady, and you will live well here, for Florentines know how to live well. But if you are sensible, you will always know where the back door is. You will plan your escape route and keep it in good working order. For when the Arno floods all those without boats are drowned."
But what should one do with power? Akbar the Great begins to wonder about the nature of his sovereignty and about the self, the universe, religion and the growing interaction between East and West: "Was foreignness itself a thing to be embraced as a revitalizing force bestowing bounty and success upon its adherents, or did it adulterate something essential in the individual and the society as a whole, did it initiate a process of decay which would end in an alienated, inauthentic death?" Akbar, in fact, daydreams of universal harmony on Earth but sadly recognizes that all his power can never make it happen:
"Once he was gone, all he had thought, all he had worked to make, his philosophy and way of being, all that would evaporate like water. The future would not be what he hoped for, but a dry hostile antagonistic place where people would survive as best they could and hate their neighbors and smash their places of worship and kill one another once again in the renewed heat of the great quarrel he had sought to end forever, the quarrel over God. In the future it was harshness, not civilization, that would rule."
Such sentiments point at the 21st century, and may jar as a result, but they are just one aspect of this dream-like pageant of a book, with its cloud-capped towers and gorgeous palaces. Rushdie risks bathos, for instance, when he refers to "The Great Uzbeg Anti-Shiite Potato and Sturgeon Curse." He calls four albino giants Otho, Botho, Clotho and D'Artagnan, recalling by turns a Roman Emperor, a German family name, the Fate who cuts the thread of life and a would-be Musketeer. In this case, you feel that he's just being silly.
No matter. At least for the summer ahead, The Enchantress of Florence will certainly live up to the romantic promise of its title. As Akbar himself reflects, "Witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits, or magic wands. Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough."
Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
Chapter 1
In the day’s last light the glowing lake
In the day’s last light the glowing lake below the palace-city looked like a sea of molten gold. A traveler coming this way at sunset –this traveler, coming this way, now, along the lakeshore road–might believe himself to be approaching the throne of a monarch so fabulously wealthy that he could allow a portion of his treasure to be poured into a giant hollow in the earth to dazzle and awe his guests. And as big as the lake of gold was, it must be only a drop drawn from the sea of the larger fortune–the traveler’s imagination could not begin to grasp the size of that mother-ocean! Nor were there guards at the golden water’s edge; was the king so generous, then, that he allowed all his subjects, and perhaps even strangers and visitors like the traveler himself, without hindrance to draw up liquid bounty from the lake? That would indeed be a prince among men, a veritable Prester John, whose lost kingdom of song and fable contained impossible wonders. Perhaps (the traveler surmised) the fountain of eternal youth lay within the city walls–perhaps even the legendary doorway to Paradise on Earth was somewhere close at hand? But then the sun fell below the horizon, the gold sank beneath the water’s surface, and was lost. Mermaids and serpents would guard it until the return of daylight. Until then, water itself would be the only treasure on offer, a gift the thirsty traveler gratefully accepted.
The stranger rode in a bullock-cart, but instead of being seated on the rough cushions therein he stood up like a god, holding on to the rail of the cart’s latticework wooden frame with one insouciant hand. A bullock-cart ride was far from smooth, the two-wheeled cart tossing and jerking to the rhythm of the animal’s hoofs, and subject, too, to the vagaries of the highway beneath its wheels. A standing man might easily fall and break his neck. Nevertheless the traveler stood, looking careless and content. The driver had long ago given up shouting at him, at first taking the foreigner for a fool–if he wanted to die on the road, let him do so, for no man in this country would be sorry! Quickly, however, the driver’s scorn had given way to a grudging admiration. The man might indeed be foolish, one could go so far as to say that he had a fool’s overly pretty face and wore a fool’s unsuitable clothes–a coat of colored leather lozenges, in such heat!–but his balance was immaculate, to be wondered at. The bullock plodded forward, the cart’s wheels hit potholes and rocks, yet the standing man barely swayed, and managed, somehow, to be graceful. A graceful fool, the driver thought, or perhaps no fool at all. Perhaps someone to be reckoned with. If he had a fault, it was that of ostentation, of seeking to be not only himself but a performance of himself as well, and, the driver thought, around here everybody is a little bit that way too, so maybe this man is not so foreign to us after all. When the passenger mentioned his thirst the driver found himself going to the water’s edge to fetch the fellow a drink in a cup made of a hollowed and varnished gourd, and holding it up for the stranger to take, for all the world as if he were an aristocrat worthy of service.
"You just stand there like a grandee and I jump and scurry at your bidding," the driver said, frowning. "I don’t know why I’m treating you so well. Who gave you the right to command me? What are you, anyway? Not a nobleman, that’s for sure, or you wouldn’t be in this cart. And yet you have airs about you. So you’re probably some kind of a rogue." The other drank deeply from the gourd. The water ran down from the edges of his mouth and hung on his shaven chin like a liquid beard. At length he handed back the empty gourd, gave a sigh of satisfaction, and wiped the beard away. "What am I?" he said, as if speaking to himself, but using the driver’s own language. "I’m a man with a secret, that’s what–a secret which only the emperor’s ears may hear." The driver felt reassured: the fellow was a fool after all. There was no need to treat him with respect. "Keep your secret," he said. "Secrets are for children, and spies." The stranger got down from the cart outside the caravanserai, where all journeys ended and began. He was surprisingly tall and carried a carpetbag. "And for sorcerers," he told the driver of the bullock-cart. "And for lovers too. And kings."
In the caravanserai all was bustle and hum. Animals were cared for, horses, camels, bullocks, asses, goats, while other, untamable animals ran wild: screechy monkeys, dogs that were no man’s pets. Shrieking parrots exploded like green fireworks in the sky. Blacksmiths were at work, and carpenters, and in chandleries on all four sides of the enormous square men planned their journeys, stocking up on groceries, candles, oil, soap, and ropes. Turbaned coolies in red shirts and dhotis ran ceaselessly hither and yon with bundles of improbable size and weight upon their heads. There was, in general, much loading and unloading of goods. Beds for the night were to be cheaply had here, wood-frame rope beds covered with spiky horsehair mattresses, standing in military ranks upon the roofs of the single-story buildings surrounding the enormous courtyard of the caravanserai, beds where a man might lie and look up at the heavens and imagine himself divine. Beyond, to the west, lay the murmuring camps of the emperor’s regiments, lately returned from the wars. The army was not permitted to enter the zone of the palaces but had to stay here at the foot of the royal hill. An unemployed army, recently home from battle, was to be treated with caution. The stranger thought of ancient Rome. An emperor trusted no soldiers except his praetorian guard. The traveler knew that the question of trust was one he would have to answer convincingly. If he did not he would quickly die.
Not far from the caravanserai, a tower studded with elephant tusks marked the way to the palace gate. All elephants belonged to the emperor, and by spiking a tower with their teeth he was demonstrating his power. Beware! the tower said. You are entering the realm of the Elephant King, a sovereign so rich in pachyderms that he can waste the gnashers of a thousand of the beasts just to decorate me. In the tower’s display of might the traveler recognized the same quality of flamboyance that burned upon his own forehead like a flame, or a mark of the Devil; but the maker of the tower had transformed into strength that quality which, in the traveler, was often seen as a weakness. Is power the only justification for an extrovert personality? the traveler asked himself, and could not answer, but found himself hoping that beauty might be another such excuse, for he was certainly beautiful, and knew that his looks had a power of their own.
Beyond the tower of the teeth stood a great well and above it a mass of incomprehensibly complex waterworks machinery that served the many-cupolaed palace on the hill. Without water we are nothing, the traveler thought. Even an emperor, denied water, would swiftly turn to dust. Water is the real monarch and we are all its slaves. Once at home in Florence he had met a man who could make water disappear. The conjuror filled a jug to the brim, muttered magic words, turned the jug over and, instead of liquid, fabric spilled forth, a torrent of colored silken scarves. It was a trick, of course, and before that day was done he, the traveler, had coaxed the fellow’s secret out of him, and had hidden it among his own mysteries. He was a man of many secrets, but only one was fit for a king.
The road to the city wall rose quickly up the hillside and as he rose with it he saw the size of the place at which he had arrived. Plainly it was one of the grand cities of the world, larger, it seemed to his eye, than Florence or Venice or Rome, larger than any town the traveler had ever seen. He had visited London once; it too was a lesser metropolis than this. As the light failed the city seemed to grow. Dense neighborhoods huddled outside the walls, muezzins called from their minarets, and in the distance he could see the lights of large estates. Fires began to burn in the twilight, like warnings. From the black bowl of the sky came the answering fires of the stars. As if the earth and the heavens were armies preparing for battle, he thought. As if their encampments lie quiet at night and await the war of the day to come. And in all these warrens of streets and in all those houses of the mighty, beyond, on the plains, there was not one man who had heard his name, not one who would readily believe the tale he had to tell. Yet he had to tell it. He had crossed the world to do so, and he would.
He walked with long strides and attracted many curious glances, on account of his yellow hair as well as his height, his long and admittedly dirty yellow hair flowing down around his face like the golden water of the lake. The path sloped upward past the tower of the teeth toward a stone gate upon which two elephants in bas- relief stood facing each other. Through this gate, which was open, came the noises of human beings at play, eating, drinking, carousing. There were soldiers on duty at the Hatyapul gate but their stances were relaxed. The real barriers lay ahead. This was a public place, a place for meetings, purchases, and pleasure. Men hurried past the traveler, driven by hungers and thirsts. On both sides of the flagstoned road between the outer gate and the inner were hostelries, saloons, food stalls, and hawkers of all kinds. Here was the eternal business of buying and being bought. Cloths, utensils, baubles, weapons, rum. The main market lay beyond the city’s lesser, southern gate. City dwellers shopped there and avoided this place, which was for ignorant newcom...
