The Latest Spells of Salman Rushdie

What reasons had Niccolo Machiavelli for the creation of his famous work The Prince? How an ideal partner may be gained with almost no expenses? Why did Queen Elizabeth not marry a Mughal emperor?

Salman Rushdie´s last novel, The Enchantress of Florence, offers path breaking and inspiring answers to these questions, if one is not concerned with the limits of reality and historic truth too much.

The Enchantress of Florence is, as all previous Rushdie´s novels, flowing with countless narratives of various length and depth. The four hundred pages long story of Niccolo Vespucci, a Florentine who arrives at the court of the Mughal emperor Akbar with a dynasty-shaking secret to tell, is interwoven with miniature, sometimes just one sentence long vivid narratives about thieves, courtesans or kings. Nevertheless, The Enchantress of Florence differs from most of Rushdie´s works significantly. While reading, for instance, The Moor’s Last Sigh or Shame, the reader suffers from a rather strange feeling: he does not care whether the story will turn out well or badly; he simply does not want the book to end. He is more interested in the language and in the narrative itself than in the characters. He just wants to read on and on.

In The Enchantress of Florence, this uttermost pleasure derived from the deluge of stories is by no means lesser, but the reader is frequently overwhelmed by the interest in the main, framing narrative of the novel and in the fate of the characters. Rushdie´s characters are usually colourful, extraordinary and very real (frequently irrespective of their actual non-existence), but the inhabitants of the world of his last work demand a much greater deal of one’s concern, sympathy and sometimes even love than any other offsprings of Rushdie´s imagination. The Enchantress of Florence lacks the self-ironical first person narrator of Midnight’s Children or The Moor’s Last Sigh, its narrator is covert and omnipotent, and this, together with the fact that the novel begins and ends with the same characters (once more in contrast with other Rushdie´s works) gives the story its intensity, compactness and its immense captivating charm.

Sometimes the flooding of countless stories, characters and excursions may be too much for the reader to bear and perhaps he would like to shout: “No more, I´ve had enough, I´m drowning!”, but all this chaos is usually so amusing that it does not matter if one does not know what is going on for a while.

The Enchantress of Florence is a story of merging. East once more merges with West (the Mughal court and Renaissance Florence), great, public history with small, private lives of individual human beings (discovery of the New World, creation of Machiavelli’s The Prince, or the Medici cup, all of these are somehow interconnected with the characters) and fiction merges with reality (the Emperor thinks an ideal queen for himself out of nothing) in the story of Niccolo Vespucci, who claims to be a son of Quara Köz, lost and forgotten Mughal princess. The Enchantress of Florence provides the reader in a generous manner with all he expects from a novel by Salman Rushdie: linguistic wits and puns, extremely clever and amusing hints to everyone and everything, the most unexpected and breathtaking situations and plots, sharp and wise satirical comments concerning mainly history, religion and language.

The novel is as charming, surprising and full of secrets as the Enchantress of Florence, Quara Köz, so-called Lady Black Eyes, herself. When the reader has just finished the book, he would probably willingly follow the example of Dashwanth, a painter at the Mughal court, who falls so deeply in love with his subject that he voluntarily abandons his earthly life, and becomes part of his own work of art. Giving up one´s 21^st century, spells lacking life for the wonderful, colourful world of Rushdie´s imagination seems to be a seductive opportunity.