The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel
by Salman Rushdie
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Book Summary Information
Author: Salman RushdieEdition: Hardcover
Published: 2008-05-27
ISBN: 0375504338
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Random House
Book Reviews of The Enchantress of Florence: A Novel
Book Review: Enchantress: "You are already who you are, [sire]...Whereas I am just trying to become what I have it in me to be."
Summary: 4 Stars
The relationship between the sexes over time and across civilizations is a unifying theme of this broad historical novel and philosophical exploration of the role of the individual within his society. Opening in the court of Akbar the Great, head of the Mughal Empire, Rushdie's latest novel moves back and forth between Mughal India, the Florence of the Medicis, and the Turkish court of the Ottoman Empire. Eventually, his characters even look toward a new land, recently discovered and named by Amerigo Vespucci, a cousin of one of the main characters. Though the novel is complex in its structure and sometimes challenging with its swirling time frame, Rushdie keeps his tone relatively playful, filling the novel with the fantastic, even as he is also depicting violent battles, internecine intrigues, and bloodshed. As always, his prose style is breath-taking, and the questions he raises are thought-provoking.
A yellow-haired stranger wearing a coat of many colors becomes the main storyteller when he arrives at Akbar's court and claims that he is blood kin to the royal family. His tale of his family history, filled with legends about Akbar's family, keep him alive so that he can ingratiate himself with the king, to whom he wishes to present a letter supposedly from Queen Elizabeth. This plot merges with that of Florence when some of the characters mentioned in the Mughal section become main characters in the Florentine section. Three friends, Ago Vespucci, Niccolo "il Machia," and Nino Argalia experience different kinds of lives under different kinds of rulers, a theme that Rushdie ties to that of the individual's search for identity within society.
Throughout the novel, the male characters are sometimes literally bewitched by beautiful women, whom they often idealize to the point that they create new, imaginary characters whom they see as real, including the beautiful, but imaginary, Mughal Queen. One of her distant relatives, "The Enchantress of Florence," known also as Qara Koz, Angelica, and Lady Black Eyes, has lived in the Mughal Empire, Ottoman Turkey, and Florence, a woman who has bewitched every male who comes into contact with her. She, however, just wants to "become what I have it in me to be," and it is she who is supposed to be the mother of the yellow-haired stranger, though she would have been sixty when he was born, perhaps magically.
The novel, while playful and often humorous, has a monumental scope, dealing with three civilizations, many characters with multiple names, complex historical connections shown through vividly depicted wars, elements of fantasy and magic, and movement back and forth in time, as the yellow-haired storyteller tells his story and gets interrupted by his listener(s). This can sometimes be off-putting for the reader, preventing the reader from identifying with characters and instead forcing him/her to be an interpreter of what is happening as the story moves off in many directions at once. The puns, wordplay, and delightful jokes in a novel like The Moor's Last Sigh, for example, are not an important part of this novel, in which the author seems to stand apart, leaving the reader on his/her own. n Mary Whipple
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