Salman Rushdie's Novel The Enchantress of Florence: Magical Realism at its Best

Salman Rushdie is often best known for his novel The Satanic Verses: A Novel.What many don’t know, however, is that he does magical realism in a way that is often not encountered in today’s fiction. The Enchantress of Florence: A Novelis at once a tale of Renaissance Italy, India, and most of the seas in between. It is a story of travelers, magical princesses, and the richness of desire and love. Deeply philosophical and profoundly lonely, The Enchantress of Florence: A Novelis bound to be one of Rushdie’s most popular novels.

Akbar the Great, whose realm stretches from Kabul to Bengal, is as mad and melancholy as Hamlet; despite his many wives, he lusts after a queen he dreamed up ''in the way that lonely children dream up imaginary friends.'' Then a Florentine magic man calling himself Niccolò Vespucci arrives in Akbar's court with a yarn about a common relative: a sorceress descended from Genghis Khan, a good witch at the center of a great fable. Qara Koz, a beautiful mysterious princess who bridges both Asian and European worlds with her powers of enchantment and sorcery becomes war booty.

In one marvelous scene Akbar's wife and mother come to show his imaginary wife Jodha how to release him from the Enchantress's spell, and in so doing are reconciled with Jodha in a moment of hilarious feminine solidarity - but the Enchantress materializes, Jodha vanishes, the women are defeated by the man's obsession. Indeed, the men in the book are as hormone-besotted as adolescents. All their derring-do, their battling for cities and empires, comes down to little more than a desire for a bed with a young woman in it. Machiavelli becomes a disappointed middle-aged lecher whose middle-aged wife "waddles" and "quacks" while he looks at her, of course, with loathing. But then suddenly, for a page or two, we slip into her soul; we feel her anger at his disloyalty, her hurt pride as a woman, her unchanged pride in his "dark skeptical genius" and her puzzlement at his failure to see how he lessens himself by scorning what he has that is treasurable and honorable. For that moment I glimpsed a very different book, almost a different author. Then it was back to the dazzling play of fancy and the powerful dreams of men.

The essential compatibility of the realistic and the fantastic imagination may explain the success of Rushdie's sumptuous, impetuous mixture of history with fable. But in the end, of course, it is the hand of the master artist, past all explanation, that gives this book its glamor and power, its humor and shock, its verve, its glory. It is a wonderful tale, full of follies and enchantments. East meets west with a clash of cymbals and a burst of fireworks. Salman Rushdie’s prose is expansive, lush and full of historical precision. The Enchantress of Florence: A Novelis every bit as good as I hoped it would be when I opened the cover; you won’t be disappointed.

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