The Enchantress of Florence Salman Rushdie

Poetry is brewing.  Perhaps, due to Rushide’s luxurious, beautiful and  resplendent prose.    I am on the last chapter.  Akbar is king… everything is being summed up, and all is coming to its conclusion…it is a beautiful book.  It's situated in Transoxiana, in Samarkand, ---where I lived in a traditional garden house, for 6 months, as a Fulbright Scholar and consultant to the museums. The involvement of a "princess" from that region reminds me of the many mentions in Samarkand of Alexander the Great's choice of a wife from what is now Uzbekistan... once a far reach of Greece, and then, of Persia...all of this history interwoven with the court of Mughal India. 

Authors comment and share , with eloquence.  

 Ursula Le Guin says, it is “Brilliant…Rushdie’s sumptous mixture of history and fable is magnificent.” 

Alan Cheuse says, in the Chicago Tribune, “A baroque whirlwind of a narrative…Rushdie helps us escape from the present into a dreamlike past that ultimately makes us more aware of the dangers and illusions of our everyday lives.” 

Joyce Carol Oates says,  “This is history jubilantly missed with postmodern magic realism”.

Rushdie gives thanks, in his acknowledgements, among others, friend, and curator, Stefan Carboni at the Metropolitan museum of Art’s Islamic wing. He adds: , “And also to Ian McEwan, with whom, many years ago, I improvised a song called “My Sweet Polenta”.  Ian McEwan is responsible for "Atonement" . 

 

The narrative centers on a most beautiful and mysterious woman,  the daughter of Timur or Tamerlane,who is considered a sorceress, as all bow to her powers, as do the  men who are enchanted by her, all longing to possess her.    Qara Koz 's own true love is a warrior, although  she is loved by kings as she proves herself equal to them.  She is a tribute and a gift of battles and conquest.   The story interweaves Mughal empire of much loved emperor Akbar in India and the Florentine Renaissance merchant princes, the Medici, including the author, Machiavelli.   The prose is lush and vivid.  Rushdie has the gift of genius of the greatest storytellers, to make us care about the characters he invents, and their destinies.  I have not loved an author's words  so much since "The Museum of Innocence" by Orhan Pamuk.   One cannot wait to return and turn the pages revealing  the lives of the characters and their changing  in-scape and landscape.  Both are about some kind of "obsession" .  It would seem that Keats was right. "Beauty is truth and that is all we need to know". ???? 

 

A Room with a View

 I have always loved to photograph or view images of the "window views" of writers, or the window out of which they look, when they glance up from their desk.  This penchant may have started with a letter from Walter Farley, to a young girl, myself, when I was 10 or 12 years old. I had written him to tell him how much I loved the Black Stallion series, how I had read every book, and what it meant to me, to see the world from the viewpoint of a horse.  One can imagine that a teen would have more in common with the innocence of an animal, than with many people, that is, adults.  Stephen Spielberg just brought out a film, " The War Horse", which takes this perspective. He said that he learned he wanted to be a parent, when he made ET.  He was frightened of horses, because he had a bad fall as a child, but now one of his daughters rides horses, in part, the source of the film version of the play originally on the stage in London.  As for Walter Farley, he wrote , "I am sitting at my desk where I write, looking out on the meadow where a new filly and her mother are grazing...and that he was happy to hear from me...and then he drew a picture of the horses to end his letter to me.  I hope the letter still rests in my archives somewhere, and has not been lost in all the moves, in my life. His words and his action have never left my memory.   

My favorite author's window is the one of Anna Akhmatova, in the art historian's house in which she lived in St. Petersburg, and the one room, she had, in which she both slept and lived and wrote. I have the original art photos of that room's view; she looked out on a wonderful tree.  

In teaching Moby Dick, here in China, I found an image of the desk and the view Herman Melville had from his desk, that of the mountains, which gave him inspiration.  The sky was his sea, and he created a mountain out of a whale.   

                              View from my writing desk, after a snowfall

Last night, as I returned from Shanghai to Nanjing, snow began to fall at the gate and this morning, here is the view from my living room area in my apartment.  I like to gaze out on the architectural elements of a traditional style building, one of the few remaining at Nanjing University. Having grown up in Wisconsin, I love to see fresh snow on a winter morning in January. 

Here is the chair in which I sit to write at my pc, which my lovely cat always occupied, when I was not there! Of course, as I enter 2012, as of November, she is no longer with me...like Hiroshige's wonderful print of the cat watching from the window, she used to stretch out in the window, in front of my desk, and either watch the birds in the trees, or me writing. 

Films. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

I saw this film, "Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy" and read the review  in  The New Yorker. The story is about a recall of a veteran spy to sort out the present situation. Anothe film, "The Double" starring Richard Gere, likewise does something similar, but with different intentions and results.

 I was surprised to learn that John Le Carre is still living and in fact, has a new novel.  He actually worked for intelligence, and his stories are gleaned from the foundation of that experience.   The narrative focusses on George Smiley who we remember from  "The Spy Who Came in from the Cold" (1965) read, when I graduated high School.  I have not read any of his other books, as I am not, as many of my friends, are, "readers of mystery novels or spy thrillers."  Le Carre is one of the few mystery writers who is taught in courses of literature, for instance at the University of Pennsylvania, where a course once looked at mysteries as genre.  After all, Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes are enjoying a revival of sorts,the latter with a post modern spin in film. 

Anthony Lane, the reviewer,  quotes Coleridge, 'The frost performs its secret ministry".  . I am not sure how he relates that quote to his task...as Coleridge's mystery is abit different! Lane proscribes Le Carre, as the "supreme ironist"  when the first three words in his story are:  "The truth is"..Le Carre has the privilege, as author,  to advance  that "Hearts and minds are not to be won; they are, in this world, for sale", is Lane's estimation.  I agree with the reviewer who ends his criticism by recommending that we should all return to the original book (1974)..for more than the film delivers.

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As for the most recent "Sherlock Holmes and Shadows", I like it more than the first, which perhaps was too much of a stretch from how one imagines Holmes...more significantly it has sent viewers of the film back to the Conan Doyle books. They are becoming readers!  Amy Sommers, a friend from Portland Maine, who is a an attorney in a law firm in Shanghai, brought her son to a recent art opening at OV Galleries in Shanghai.  Ten year old RYan was sitting in a corner reading his kindle; Amy revealed that he had downloaded Sherlock Holmes after watching the film which we both liked. So what does it matter if I liked it. 




I have a book, Midnight in Peking,  by Paul French, one of Shanghai's expat authors, now published by Penguin in China and so far I cannot read it, excepting the first page which describes the fox tower in Beijing and how that is relevant to the murder of Pamela Werner, the beautiful young daughter, of  the British consul in Beijing, a murder which has never been resolved, due to the outbreak of the war, at that very moment, the closure of the embassy, the ousting of the British diplomat.  The author actually found the buried archives of that year's records in storage by chance and met the police inspector, now retired, running a pub in England, as he researched this story.  What is noble in Paul's effort is the restoration of her memory, though this tale. (more on this later, when I update this post and read the book)