The enchantress of Florence A novel

Salman Rushdie

Book - 2008

A tall, yellow-haired young European traveler calling himself the Mughal of Love, arrives at the court of the real Grand Mughal. He claims to be the child of a lost Mughal princess, the youngest sister of Akbar's grandfather Babar.

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Subjects
Published
New York : Random House c2008.
Language
English
Main Author
Salman Rushdie (-)
Edition
1st ed
Physical Description
355 p. ; 25 cm
Bibliography
Includes bibliographical references (p. [351]-355).
ISBN
9780375504334
Contents unavailable.
Review by New York Times Review

Salman Rushdie's new novel is about the imagination. 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? Well, since I asked, I'll tell you. Kafka doesn't present Gregor Samsa's transformation as a marvel but as a shameful matter of fact, and nowhere does he betray any pride in having dreamed it up - in fact, you get the feeling he'd rather not have. "The Enchantress of Florence," on the other hand, revels in writerly self-congratulation. The traveler in that first paragraph has come from Florence to the Mughal ruler Akbar's court at Sikri (near Agra) to tell a secret tale "which only the emperor's ears may hear," and Rushdie gives him a hero-writer buildup, a not-so-oblique portrait of the artist that would make even Joyce blush. "He could dream in seven languages. ... As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain, telling wondrous travelers' tales. In this half-discovered world every day brought news of fresh enchantments. The visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian had not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact. Himself a teller of tales, he had been driven out of his door by stories of wonder, and by one in particular, a story which could make his fortune or cost him his life." And so ends the first chapter. It's your standard kitchy-koo cliffhanger, and you won't be surprised to hear that it takes the rest of the novel for our multicultural dream weaver - whose cosmopolitan creator wrote a book two decades ago that could still cost him his life - to get his tale completely told. This book-long tease makes it hard to summarize the plot without ruining the intended effect - and I'm not sure I followed all its meanderings anyway. The yellow-haired traveler from the city of the Medicis claims a blood relationship with the emperor of the Mughals: a literal manifestation of the connection between East and West that's one of the novel's thematic strands. As one character puts it, "the curse of the human race is not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike." The tale involves a lost princess - a descendant of Genghis Khan, no less - who becomes a sort of magical mascot for Florence; the princess's look-alike maidservant called the Mirror; a Florentine soldier of fortune who sells his services to the Ottoman Empire; a pair of prostitutes named the Skeleton and the Mattress (guess what they look like); and Akbar's imaginary wife, who for some reason "could walk, talk and make love in spite of not existing." I find this paradox more annoying than enchanting, but for better or worse, the novel posits a world "before the real and the unreal were segregated forever." It's more than just conventional historical novelizing, therefore, when Rushdie places his imaginary characters among such historical personages as Akbar the Great himself, Niccolò Machiavelli, assorted Medicis, Savonarola, even the nasty Wallachian warlord Vlad Dracula. As Rushdie recreates him, Akbar is an absolute monarch beset by democratic, even anarchic, impulses. "Discord could be quelled, and it was his fist that could quell it. But what, then, of the voice within that whispered ... that discord, difference, disobedience, disagreement, irreverence, iconoclasm, impudence, even insolence, might be wellsprings of the good. These thoughts were not fit for a king." Despite the real-life Akbar's reputation for religious toleration, such thoughts - like the "culture of inclusion" he contemplates and his notion that life is "absurd" - are a far more plausible fit for an anti-authoritarian 21st-century novelist; Rushdie has made Akbar recite the Dissenter's Creed. Similarly, Rushdie's Florence is an Eden of libertarian - or libertine - sensuality: "Imagine a pair of women's lips," says the traveler, "puckering for a kiss. That is the city of Florence ... with the Arno flowing through between." And under the fictive Enchantress, the city briefly becomes the New Jerusalem: her "womanly powers" create "a benevolent haze which filled the thoughts of Florentines with images of parental, filial, carnal and divine love. ... Subtle perfumes of reconciliation and harmony filled the air, people worked harder and more productively, the quality of family life improved, the birth rate rose and all the churches were full." This evocation is itself benevolently hazy - as images of the Good tend to be in fiction - and Florence's golden age doesn't survive an antifeminist backlash. "The distance between enchantress and witch was still not so great. There were still voices that suggested that this new incarnation of the Woman-wizard through whom the occult powers of all women were unleashed was a disguise, and that the true faces of such females were still the fearsome ones of old, the lamia, the crone." (The occult powers of all women? Oh well, it's his book.) And the tolerant Akbar's dire prophecy for the future turns out to be spot on: "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." Now how on earth did he know that? BUT despite such bald message-mongering, this isn't primarily a political novel but a work of imagination about the imagination. Such ginned-up marvels as the magic fragrances that get the Florentine traveler past guards and underlings and into the emperor's presence may be either transporting fantasies or time-wasting claptrap, depending on your taste or your mood. But enchantment, finally, is only a metaphor: "Witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits or magic wands. Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough." I doubt a writer with a truly silvered tongue would use the expression "silvered tongue," but who could disagree with the thought? No writer - and no reader - doubts the transformative power of language. Now can we shut up about it? "The Enchantress of Florence" is so pious - especially in its impiety - so pleased with itself and so besotted with the sound of its own voice that even the tritest fancies get a free pass. "But imagine, Jodha," Akbar tells his imaginary wife, "if we could awake in other men's dreams and change them, and if we had the courage to invite them into ours. What if the whole world became a single waking dream?" Not that again - didn't Samuel Johnson squelch such Berkeleyan whimsies back in the 18th century by kicking a stone? Maybe it's just my philistine cussedness talking, but life's just too short. 'He could dream in seven languages. ... As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain.' David Gates's most recent book is "The Wonders of the Invisible World," a collection of stories.

Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 27, 2009]
Review by Booklist Review

*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.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2008 Booklist

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

Renaissance Florence's artistic zenith and Mughal India's cultural summit--reached the following century, at Emperor Akbar's court in Sikri--are the twin beacons of Rushdie's ingenious latest, a dense but sparkling return to form. The connecting link between the two cities and epochs is the magically beautiful "hidden princess," Qara Kez, so gorgeous that her uncovered face makes battle-hardened warriors drop to their knees. Her story underlies the book's circuitous journey. A mysterious yellow-haired man in a multicolored coat steps off a rented bullock cart and walks into 16th-century Sikri: he speaks excellent Persian, has a stock of conjurer's tricks and claims to be Akbar's uncle. He carries with him a letter from Queen Elizabeth I, which he translates for Akbar with vast incorrectness. But it is the story of Akbar's great-aunt, Qara Kez, that the man (her putative son) has come to the court to tell. The tale dates to the time of Akbar's grandfather, Babar (Qara Kez's brother), and it involves her relationship with the Persian Shah. In the Shah's employ is Janissary general Nino Argalia, an Italian convert to Islam, whose own story takes the narrative to Renaissance Florence. Rushdie eventually presents an extended portrait of Florence through the eyes of Niccoli Machiavelli and Ago Vespucci, cousin of the more famous Amerigo. Rushdie's portrayal of Florence pales in comparison with his depiction of Mughal court society, but it brings Rushdie to his real fascination here: the multitudinous, capillary connections between East and West, a secret history of interchanges that's disguised by standard histories in which West "discovers" East. Along the novel's roundabout way, Qara Kez does seem more alive as a sexual obsession in the tales swapped by various men than as her own person. Genial Akbar, however, emerges as the most fascinating character in the book. Chuang Tzu tells of a man who dreams of being a butterfly and, on waking up, wonders whether he is now a butterfly dreaming he is a man. In Rushdie's version of the West and East, the two cultures take on a similar blended polarity in Akbar as he listens to the tales. Each culture becomes the dream of the other. (June) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review

Booker Prize winner Rushdie's (Midnight's Children) complex new novel centers on 16th-century Mughal emperor Akbar the Great and a mysterious European traveler who arrives in his court with an extraordinary story to tell. While the print edition received excellent reviews, this audio version, with Bombay-born movie and television actor Firdous Bamji's slow and deliberate reading, is less successful. Recommended with reservations for larger public libraries where Rushdie and literary fiction have followings. [With tracks every three minutes for bookmarking; the Random House hc was "highly recommended," LJ 5/15/08.--Ed.]--Mary Knapp, Madison P.L., WI (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

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 newcomers who did not know the real price of things. This was the swindlers' market, the thieves' market, raucous, overpriced, contemptible. But tired travelers, not knowing the plan of the city, and reluctant, in any case, to walk all the way around the outer walls to the larger, fairer bazaar, had little option but to deal with the merchants by the elephant gate. Their needs were urgent and simple. Live chickens, noisy with fear, hung upside down, fluttering, their feet tied together, awaiting the pot. For vegetarians there were other, more silent cook-pots; vegetables did not scream. And were those women's voices the traveler could hear on the wind, ululating, teasing, enticing, laughing at unseen men? Were those women he scented upon the evening breeze? It was too late to go looking for the emperor tonight, in any case. The traveler had money in his pocket and had made a long, roundabout journey. This way was his way: to move toward his goal indirectly, with many detours and divagations. Since landing at Surat he had traveled by way of Burhanpur, Handia, Sironj, Narwar, Gwalior, and Dholpur to Agra, and from Agra to this, the new capital. Now he wanted the most comfortable bed that could be had, and a woman, preferably one without a mustache, and finally a quantity of the oblivion, the escape from self, that can never be found in a woman's arms but only in good strong drink. Later, when his desires had been satisfied, he slept in an odorous whorehouse, snoring lustily next to an insomniac tart, and dreamed. He could dream in seven languages: Italian, Spanish, Arabic, Persian, Russian, English, and Portuguese. He had picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague. As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain, telling wondrous travelers' tales. In this half-discovered world every day brought news of fresh enchantments. The visionary, revelatory dream-poetry of the quotidian had not yet been crushed by blinkered, prosy fact. Himself a teller of tales, he had been driven out of his door by stories of wonder, and by one in particular, a story which could make his fortune or else cost him his life. Excerpted from The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie Copyright (c) 2008 by Salman Rushdie. Excerpted by permission of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher. Excerpted from The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.