the enchantress of florence by salman rushdie

Rushdie is striving for the intricate correspondence of Nabokov, but he doesn’t get there: the voice isn’t as firmly anchored to the characters as Nabokov in Pnin or Lolita, the characters are never quite so alive, and The Enchantress of Florence lacks that visceral sense of reality that a historical novel like Eco’s The Name of the Rose has. Maybe there are more clever resonances among parts of the novel the king thinks “No Man was ever free,” and yet the woman inside his head thinks she is free. Granted, she might eventually turn out to be a real person-this is magical realism, and I quit halfway after the fiftieth time I wondered, “What’s the point?”-but from here Jodha doesn’t go far. That’s nice, but we’ve gone through pages and pages of meditation on what it means to be a creator and creative sort, and still more verbal games that become tiresome, especially with the double use of the word “free” in a situation that just doesn’t quite seem to merit it, even if we’re supposed to get the irony of her being “free” when by definition she can’t be free of his mind. Now that the act of creation was complete she was free to be the person he had created, free, as everyone was, within the bounds of what it was in their nature to be and do.

Given that Jodha, who exists only in the mind of the king, says this, it works on multiple levels: she’s removed from the place where she would have meaning, and yet if she were removed from the emperor’s mind she’d have none because she wouldn’t exist-a neat paradoxical situation that nonetheless gets old a page later, when she says: It removed you from the place in which you had a meaning, and to which you gave meaning in return by dedicating your life to it, and it spirited you away into fairylands where you were, and looked, frankly absurd. Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence disappoints Seldom has so great an ability to describe and so much seething talent been put to so little use as in this novel, where numerous sumptuous descriptions-though not so numerous or so skillful as Umberto Eco’s in Foucault’s Pendulum-add up to little more than yammering.

The enchantress of florence by salman rushdie