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". ????