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Executive Times |
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2008 Book Reviews |
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The
Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie |
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Rating: |
*** |
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(Recommended) |
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Click
on title or picture to buy from amazon.com |
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Magical Salman
Rushdie’s The
Enchantress of Florence is the most unusual book I’ve read this year.
Think of it as a fairy tale for grownups. Rather than a single story, The
Enchantress of Florence weaves expansively written multiple stories and
perspectives into something magical. At times, I found myself thinking that
he already told this story, to awaken to hearing a different perspective or a
different telling of a common story. Here’s an excerpt, from the beginning of
Chapter 3, pp. 27-29: At dawn the haunting sandstone
palaces of the new "victory city" of Akbar the Great looked as if
they were made of red smoke. Most cities start giving the impression of being
eternal almost as soon as they are born, but Sikri would always look like a
mirage. As the sun rose to its zenith, the great bludgeon of the day's heat
pounded the flagstones, deafening human ears to all sounds, making the air
quiver like a frightened blackbuck, and weakening the border between sanity
and delirium, between what was fanciful and what was real. Even the emperor succumbed to
fantasy. Queens floated within his palaces like ghosts, Rajput and Turkish
sultanas playing catch-me-if-you-can. One of these royal personages did not
really exist. She was an imaginary wife, dreamed up by Akbar in the way that
lonely children dream up imaginary friends, and in spite of the presence of
many living, if floating, consorts, the emperor was of the opinion that it
was the real queens who were the phantoms and the nonexistent beloved who .
was real. He gave her a name, Jodha, and no man dared gainsay him. Within the
privacy of the women's quarters, within the silken corridors of her palace,
her influence and power grew. Tansen wrote songs for her and in the
studio-scriptorium her beauty was celebrated in portraiture and verse. Master
Abdus Samad the Persian portrayed her himself, painted her from the memory of
a dream without ever looking upon her face, and when the emperor saw his work
he clapped his hands at the beauty shining up from the page. "You have
captured her, to the life," he cried, and Abdus Samad relaxed and
stopped feeling as if his head was too loosely attached to his neck; and
after this visionary work by the master of the emperor's atelier had been
exhibited, the whole court knew Jodha to be real, and the greatest courtiers,
the Navratna or
Nine Stars, all acknowledged not only her existence but also her beauty, her
wisdom, the grace of her movements, and the softness of her voice. Akbar and
Jodhabai! Ah, ah! It was the love story of the age. The city was finished at last,
in time for the emperor's fortieth birthday. It had been twelve hot years in
the making, but for a long time he had been given the impression that it rose
up effortlessly, year by year, as if by sorcery. His minister of works had
not allowed any construction to go forward during the emperor's sojourns in
the new imperial capital. When the emperor was in residence the stonemasons'
tools fell silent, the carpenters drove in no nails, the painters, the
inlay-workers, the hangers of fabrics, and the carvers of screens all disappeared
from view. All then, it's said, was cushioned pleasure. Only noises of
delight were permitted to be heard. The bells on the ankles of dancers echoed
sweetly, and fountains tinkled, and the soft music of the genius Tansen hung
upon the breeze. There was whispered poetry in the emperor's ear, and in the
pachisi courtyard on Thursdays there was much languid play, with slave girls
being used as living pieces on the checkerboard floor. In the curtained
afternoons beneath the sliding punkahs there was a quiet time for love. The
city's sensuous hush was brought into being by the monarch's omnipotence as
much as by the heat of the day. No city is all palaces. The
real city, built of wood and mud and dung and brick as well as stone, huddled
beneath the walls of the mighty red stone plinth upon which the royal
residences stood. Its neighborhoods were determined by race as well as trade.
Here was the silversmiths' street, there the hot-gated, clanging armories,
and there, down that third gully, the place of bangles and clothes. To the
east was the Hindu colony and beyond that, curling around the city walls, the
Persian quarter, and beyond that the region of the Turanis and beyond that,
in the vicinity of the giant gate of the Friday Mosque, the homes of those
Muslims who were Indian born. Dotted around the countryside were the villas
of the nobles, the art studio and scriptorium whose fame had already spread
throughout the land, and a pavilion of music, and another for the performance
of dances. In most of these lower Sikris there was little time for indolence,
and when the emperor came home from the wars the command of silence felt, in
the mud city, like a suffocation. Chickens had to be gagged at the moment of
their slaughter for fear of disturbing the repose of the king of kings. A
cartwheel that squeaked could earn the cart's driver the lash, and if he
cried out under the whip the penalty could be even more severe. Women giving
birth withheld their cries and the dumb show of the marketplace was a kind
of madness: "When the king is here we are all made mad," the people
said, adding, hastily, for there were spies and traitors everywhere,
"for joy." The mud city loved its emperor, it insisted that it did,
insisted without words, for words were made of that forbidden fabric, sound.
When the emperor set forth once more on his campaigns —his his never-ending
(though always victorious) battles against the armies of Gujarat and
Rajasthan, of Kabul and Kashmir--then the prison of silence was unlocked, and
trumpets burst out, and cheers, and people were finally able to tell each
other everything they had been obliged to keep unsaid for months on end. I
love you. My mother is dead. Your soup tastes good. If you do not pay me the
money you owe me I will break your arms at the elbows. My darling, I love you
too. Everything. There
are some sentences in The
Enchantress of Florence that even Sister Mary Clement, the seventh grade teacher
from Saint Jerome School in 1961, could not diagram in a single day. For any
reader who would like to be captivated by the power of stories, immerse
yourself in The
Enchantress of Florence. Steve
Hopkins, August 15, 2008 |
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Go to Executive Times Archives |
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The recommendation rating for
this book appeared in the Seeptember 2008 issue of Executive Times URL for this review: http://www.hopkinsandcompany.com/Books/The Enchantress of Florence.htm For Reprint Permission,
Contact: Hopkins & Company, LLC • E-mail: books@hopkinsandcompany.com |
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