THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE
Random House, $26, 368 pages
REVIEWED BY SUDIP BOSE
Amysterious stranger arriving from a distant land - it’s an old literary device to begin a novel that way, allowing the writer to create instant tension and tease the reader’s expectations of what’s to come. Salman Rushdie employs the trick particularly well in his latest novel, which is set in both Mughal India and contemporaneous, 16th-century Florence.
Mr. Rushdie’s mysterious stranger is doubly effective in establishing narrative tension: We learn early on that he possesses a powerful secret that promises to unsettle an empire, though he will only reveal it at the proper time and to only the one, intended person.
This Florentine stranger calls himself the Mogor dell’Amore (or, Mughal of Love). “Dazzlingly confident of his powers of charm, persuasion, and enchantment,” he is a yellow-haired and silver-tongued rogue, fond of spinning tales of magic and witchcraft. He arrives in the Mughal capital of Fatehpur Sikri and quickly gains an audience with Emperor Akbar the Great. By all rights, the emperor should lock him up for his insolence, but Akbar - “a Muslim vegetarian, a warrior who wanted only peace, a philosopher-king,” and “the greatest ruler the land had ever known” - is moved.
The emperor views the ingratiating Italian as a potential confidante, a man whose interests, intellect and panache rival his own. Akbar longs, after all, for “a world in which he could find exactly that man who was his equal, whom he could meet as his brother, with whom he could speak freely, teaching and learning, giving and receiving pleasure, a world in which he could forsake the gloating satisfaction of conquest for the gentler yet more taxing joys of discourse.”
Akbar wonders whether he might “open his heart to this Mogor and tell him things that he had never said.” Among other things, “The Enchantress of Florence” is about the unburdening of secrets, of the basic human need to tell stories, to convey narrative. (“All men needed to hear their stories told,” Mr. Rushdie writes, and no doubt he has himself in mind.) Of course, in the world evoked by the novel, oral narrative takes the form of fairy tales; in this way, we are in the familiar terrain of Mr. Rushdie’s earlier “Haroun and the Sea of Stories,” though this present work is far bawdier, a great deal more subversive.
Given the magical (though decidedly not magical-realist) subtext, we should not be surprised to find the novel filled with spells, potions, sorcery and imaginary queens. Yes, we are immersed in very real historical places - Akbar the Great did indeed preside over the Mughal Empire from Fatehpur Sikri from 1571 to 1585, and the Florentine pages of the book are filled with such figures as Andrea Doria and Amerigo Vespucci.
But Mr. Rushdie creates a shimmering alternate universe, where physical objects are not entirely solid, where nothing seems quite real. Note how the “sandstone palaces” of Akbar’s city - solid, massive things - “looked as if they were made of red smoke,” how the entire capital trembled “in the heat like an opium vision.”
The Mogor’s great secret, it turns out, has to do with a rather convoluted claim to kinship. And it has to do, more important, with “a Mughal princess, and the most beautiful woman anyone had ever seen, and an enchantress without compare, a mistress of potions and spells of whose powers all were afraid.” This is none other than the eponymous Enchantress of Florence: the Princess Qara Koz. A figure at once haunting and irresistible, she is a “dark beauty,” an embodiment of “physical perfection,” and Mr. Rushdie’s narrative plunges headlong from the Mogor’s arrival in India to her much-anticipated unveiling.
“The Enchantress of Florence” - aside from being a meditation on home, on foreignness, on the nexus of East and West, on physical and metaphorical journeys - is a great ode to the power of feminine beauty. So stunning is Qara Koz, that the mere mention of her name causes “people … to dream about her all the time, women as well as men, courtiers as well as guttersnipes, sadhus as well as whores.” She stands as a metaphor for all womankind, many things to many people, at once “a paragon of Muslim devotion and conservative behavior,” “a free-spirited adventuress whose irreverent, even blasphemous gaiety was a little shocking but entirely delightful,” and “the personification of female sexuality.”
Of course, as Mr. Rushdie writes, “the distance between enchantress and witch was … not so great.” One moment, you’re holding an entire city in your thrall. The next, you’ve morphed into “the witch,” the “ugly old monster,” “the hag.” And it is in a line like that where we begin to sense a subtle authorial disdain for the glorious Qara Koz, as powerful and compelling as is the writer’s jaw-dropping admiration.
The main problem, for me, is the uneven quality of Mr. Rushdie’s novel. Whereas the writing at first is ebullient, joyful, verbally playful (as we might come to expect from a Salman Rushdie work), and downright funny, it seems to lose much of its drive halfway through. More tellingly, after page upon page in which we anticipate the arrival of the great beauty Qara Koz, in which her legend steadily grows, her appearance comes as a decided anticlimax. We have expected the great Venus of her age, of all ages, but the woman Mr. Rushdie renders cannot possibly meet our expectations.
Think of the narrator of Wordsworth’s “Prelude,” who finally gazes upon the wondrous crown of the French Alps, after years of imagining its breathtaking contours, and is utterly disappointed: “From a bare ridge we also first beheld / Unveiled the summit of Mont Blanc, and grieved / To have a soulless image on the eye / That had usurped upon a living thought / That never more could be.”
Indeed, how could the woman - any woman - in the flesh not be usurped by so lavish a legend preceding her? Mr. Rushdie’s subject may be “the undying power and extraordinary capacity of the human heart for love,” but in the end, the object we are meant to love (and indeed, she is truly objectified) is a little too perfect, a fantasy, a fiction, as impossible to grasp as a wisp of red smoke.
m Sudip Bose is senior editor of Preservation magazine.
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