Salman Rushdie: The Enchantress of Florence
(1 votes, average: 5.00 out of 5)
Loading ...The Enchantress of Florence is the story of a woman attempting to command her own destiny in a man’s world. It is the story of two cities, unknown to each other, at the height of their powers–the hedonistic Mughal capital, in which the brilliant Akbar the Great wrestles daily with questions of belief, desire, and the treachery of his sons, and the equally sensual city of Florence during the High Renaissance, where Niccolò Machiavelli takes a starring role as he learns, the hard way, about the true brutality of power.
Salman Rushdie is the author of nine previous novels, including 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) and The Satanic Verses (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel). 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.
n among this languid glitter, the book does not develop arguments as such; characters are rather occasionally prone to a rush of epigram and aphorism. The whole, though, is the latest instalment in Rushdie’s lifelong manifesto for the transformative power of narrative, for the storyteller as the conductor of all the world’s chaos. (In this sense, once again, Rushdie emerges as the hero of his own fiction, the man who can shape and shift like no other.)
Critic’s comments:
He has always created the sense of the novelist as plate-spinner: keeping an unlikely number of tales in the air, darting among them to give each one further momentum just as it starts to wobble. The Enchantress of Florence is a virtuoso demonstration of this energetic art; among other things, it challenges you to pay attention, half-believing it could all fall around his ears at any moment, marvelling that it never quite does. …
Tim Adams
The Observer, Sunday 20 April 2008
From the very beginning of his new novel, “The Enchantress of Florence,” Salman Rushdie plunges us into a world of marvels: “In the day’s last light the glowing lake below the palace-city looked like a sea of molten gold. … 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.” And sure enough, that’s where he began to lose me. I’m probably not Rushdie’s target audience: in literature, at least, I find the marvelous tedious, and the tedious — as rendered by a Beckett or a Raymond Carver or even a Kafka — marvelous. But if I can upset myself over the plight of a traveling salesman who wakes up one morning as a bug, why did this ingenious and ambitious novel — no less than a defense of the human imagination — leave me unmoved? ….
David Gates
NY Times, Published: June 8, 2008
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