Book Review: THE ENCHANTRESS OF FLORENCE by Salman Rushdie

-Geetika Saini

About The Book

Publisher: Vintage
Language: English
Paperback: 464 pages
Price: INR 499/-

Review

‘People forget facts, but they remember stories.’ -Joseph Campbell

Since time immemorial, speech has been a significant medium for the transmission of ideas, thoughts, information, and feelings. Even before reading and writing were conceived, oral lore was used for the dissemination of knowledge from one generation to another, and this modus operandi of storytelling played an important part in the preservation of culture and its tradition. Timeless links to the past, stories are an indispensable tool for the dispersal of information; they are potent as they help us share that information in an interesting manner by creating an emotional connection. Most of all, children love stories because they get acquainted with ideas, places, and creatures that they haven’t encountered before, and this is one of the reasons that parents, grandparents, and teachers often employ the technique of storytelling to impart valuable life lessons to them.

Stories introduce us to the magic and art of words, and this, in turn, helps us to better understand the world that we live in. They provide us with an opportunity to experience the unexpected and to see the unseen. In one such story about the mythical Mughal princess Qara Köz, or Lady Black Eyes, the wordsmith-Salman Rushdie weaves an enthralling narrative that transcends both space and time. Monikered The Enchantress of Florence, the book is a tale of tales where the eponymous heroine is a sublime beauty, an extraordinaire accredited with enchanting powers of sorcery.

The book opens with the arrival of a mysterious yellow-haired traveller in the sybaritic city of Sikri, the capital from where the Grand Mughal, Akbar rules over his great empire. The stranger who calls himself ‘Mogor dell’Amore’ or the Mughal of Love has a secret that substantiates him to be a descendant of the Mughals through his mother, the lost Princess — Qara Köz. As he narrates the tale of his mother’s daunting journey from being a Mughal princess to becoming the enchantress of the city of Florence in Italy, the entire population of Sikri, including Akbar, falls under his spell, incessantly obsessing over the magic of the fabled beauty. Mogor’s art of storytelling in the book is reminiscent of Scheherazade’s expertise at spinning a Middle Eastern folk tale in the legendary One Thousand and One Nights.

The initial two chapters introduce us to the traveller and his near-death escape from the Scottish ship tasked with bringing a letter to the emperor of India from Queen Elizabeth I of England. As the narrative shifts from the traveller to the emperor in the third chapter, we are acquainted with the character of Akbar; on top of his infatuation with his ‘perfect’ wife Jodhaa (who is a figment of his imagination), his inner tumult regarding his own power and the absolute power of god forms the crux of a large part of the novel. In the chapters that follow, this mechanism of narrative shifts between Akbar and the traveller is a recurrent phenomenon and that is how the novel advances.

Essentially, the story of a woman endeavouring to carve a niche for herself in a patrilineal time as she strives to drive her destiny in a man’s world, this tale becomes the link that brings together the two distant lands of Sikri and Florence projecting the analogy of the East and West amalgamation in the form of a young man-the stranger, Mogor dell’Amore. This novel is a paradigm of the power and influence of stories, myths, and legends in shaping the perspective of a populace. Owing to the cultural divide between the West and the East through the cities of Florence and Sikri, the themes of eroticism and hedonism have been dealt with adeptly. The transience of life and status, of how the most golden of men get reduced to nothingness when they fail to serve the purpose of those in power is yet another abounding idea in the book. With an extensive 8-page bibliography, this well-researched book mixes fantasy and fiction with history to an extent that the distinction between reality and illusion is nearly impossible to streamline.

Also, it would be favourable to keep a track of all the individuals and the chronology of events unfolding in the book, as one can easily feel lost among the vast array of characters in the story, half of which stem from original historical accounts (like the Italian explorer: Amerigo Vespucci, the author and diplomat: Machiavelli and his assistant: Agostino Vespucci, and the Medici family from Renaissance Florence to Shah Ismail of the Safavid dynasty and the Ottoman Janissaries among others) and the remaining half of which are the writer’s own fancy. For the creation of his leading lady, the author draws inspiration from the Renaissance epic poem Orlando Furioso by the Italian poet Ludovico Ariosto. In the poem, Angelica, daughter of the King of Cathay is a beautiful maiden with whom many men, including the hero and Christian knight, Orlando or Roland, fall in love. She is the stimulus for the character of Angelica (Qara Köz) in Rushdie’s novel, as the name instinctively suggests.

Over time, this book has garnered mixed reactions from the readers and it will continue to do so because of the misogynistic representation of women in the story. Where the masculine characters are depicted to be kings and heroes, the feminine have been debased as whores, slaves, and witches. However, it is a matter of perception. Doubtless, the anti-feminist hues in which the women of the story have been painted are disturbing, but it is perhaps the writer’s attempt at depicting the truth of the age when women were mere spoils of war — interchanged, bartered, raped, abused, and abandoned at the hands of men.

The Rushdie trademark of combining magical realism with historical fiction pervades the book as he reinvents the old tales in his own fashion. Not a book to be finished but definitely one to be relished, it is an experience in itself that left me pensive for hours. Although the plot is a bit complicated as the story meanders and proceeds slowly with constant digressions from the main storyline, it is not something to complain about mainly because the prose is beautifully composed with supple imagery and surreal narration on the author’s part. In fact, some sentences are so arresting that I had to re-read them multiple times in order to justifiably absorb the beauty of the words. I’ll share one for your reference:

‘He was bent on the sounds of the future and she was an echo from the distant past.’

One of the most striking features of Rushdie’s books is that his stories are not contingent on the frontiers of land. Winner of the Booker Prize in 1981, he is the kind of author who never restricts his stories to the boundaries of geography and this aspect of his work is particularly apparent in The Enchantress of Florence.