I’ve been rationing my reading of Salman Rushdie’s The Enchantress of Florence because I don’t want it to end. Because I basically want to devour this book and I fight against that. I don’t want to, but I easily could, gorge like a glutton without really tasting. The book needs to be savored, slowly, knowingly. On top of this voluntary rationing, there was some involuntary rationing when I lost track of this red book in my current flood of red-book reading — I misplaced its particular redness and tried to satisfy myself with other redness until it resurfaced once again. Thank God! I was becoming frantic. Where is “The Enchantress of Florence”? Where is it? WHERE??
I imagine that some part of my delight in this book has been discovering that Salman Rushdie is the complete opposite of the image I had of him — the dry fusty intellectual. I can’t say how I came by this view of him; it may have been based purely on his looks alone. But the man is witty, bawdy, and, yes, SMART, prodigiously so, but not intimidatingly so. I’m so thrilled to discover him and to have the realization dawn on me, page after gorgeous page, that he is, well, somewhat of a little scamp, I think. He’s impish and clever. He’s made me laugh out loud repeatedly. He’s secure enough to be whimsical and somewhat mad. The book centers on an enchantress, but Rushdie is the enchanter here, casting a spell under which I’ve willingly fallen. The book is like a Matryoshka doll: the fine points, the deep points, beautifully hidden, but not undiscoverable, inside layers of fable and fairy tale and dreams. It travels in and out of chronology and place yet I’ve never felt disoriented. Quite the opposite. I feel completely oriented in this world of the invisible and and the pretend and the mythical and the real. I don’t know how he does that, honestly. I’m completely in his thrall and will now be gearing up to read basically everything he’s ever written.
Some short excerpts that I’ve particularly enjoyed:
I.
By proper use of Sunni-Uzbeg potato-based spells it was possible to find a husband, chase off a more attractive love rival, or cause the downfall of a Shiite king. Shah Ismail had fallen victim to the rarely used Great Uzbeg Anti-Shiite Potato and Sturgeon Curse, which required quantities of potatoes and caviar which were not easy to amass, and a unity of purpose among the Sunni witches which was likewise difficult to achieve. When they heard the news of Ismail’s rout, the eastern potato witches wiped their eyes, ceased their wailing, and danced. A pirouetting Khorasani witch is a rare and particular sight, and few who saw the dance ever forgot it. And the Caviar and Potato Curse created a rift between the sisterhood of potato witches which has not been healed to this day.
II.
Ignoring his wounded right arm in its sling, he galloped home upon the wind. For indeed there was a wind that night, and they saw olive trees uprooted by it, and oaks flung aside as though they were little saplings, and walnut trees, cherry trees, and alders, so that as they rode it seem that a forest was flying through the air alongside them; and as they neared the city they heard a great tumult, such as only the people of Florence knew how to make. However, this was no tumult of joy. It was as if every man in the city had turned werewolf and was howling at the moon
(ed.: In this excerpt, Emperor Akbar’s mother and one of his wives have a conversation with their despised rival, Jodha, the emperor’s favorite — and invisible, possibly non-existent — wife. Out of necessity, they feel they must align themselves with her to protect the emperor from what they believe is his impending madness. They need Jodha, to exercise her many “powers” over the emperor.)
III.
They genuinely couldn’t see the woman to whom they were speaking, yet they were willing to arrange themselves on her carpets, lounge against her bolsters, drink the wine her servants offered, and tell the sexual secrets of women throughout history to the empty air. After a while they stopped feeling that they had lost their minds and acted as if they were alone, just the two of them talking to each other, speaking openly about what had always been closed, laughing helplessly at the shocking comedy of desire, the absurd things men wanted and the equally absurd things women would do to please them, until the years dropped away from them and they remembered their own youth, and recalled how they had been told these secrets by other stern, ferocious women, who had also dissolved, after a time, into guffaws of joy, remembering, in their turn, how the knowledge had been given to them, and by the end of it, the laughter in the room was the laughter of the generations, of all women, and of history.
They spoke in this fashion for five and a half hours and when they finished they thought it had been one of the happiest days of their lives. They began to have kinder thoughts toward Jodha than ever before. She was one of them now, part of the women’s relay; she was no longer the emperor’s creation alone. In part, she was theirs as well.
Okay. So I now have a crush on Salman Rushdie. Whatevs.
You had me at “potato-based spells,” Salman.