Salman Rushdie, The Enchantress of Florence
Jun 8th, 2008 by Peta Andersen
I have never been a fan of Salman Rushdie; I find his work too overblown, too in love with itself. But, after an interview about The Enchantress of Florence–a book that sounded like a literary and historical Harry Potter–my interest sparked.
Then, during my escape to an air-conditioned coffee shop this morning (it’s 33 C as I write this), I discovered a New York Times Book Review, pages still unsmeared and just itching to be read. Within, a review of the new Rushdie book.
David Geter, The New York Times Book Review:
From the very beginning of his new novel, “The Enchantress of Florence,” Salman Rushdie plunges us into a world of marvels: “In the day’s last light the glowing lake below the palace-city looked like a sea of molten gold. … Perhaps (the traveler surmised) the fountain of eternal youth lay within the city walls — perhaps even the legendary doorway to Paradise on Earth was somewhere close at hand? But then the sun fell below the horizon, the gold sank beneath the water’s surface, and was lost. Mermaids and serpents would guard it until the return of daylight.” And sure enough, that’s where he began to lose me. I’m probably not Rushdie’s target audience: in literature, at least, I find the marvelous tedious, and the tedious — as rendered by a Beckett or a Raymond Carver or even a Kafka — marvelous. But if I can upset myself over the plight of a traveling salesman who wakes up one morning as a bug, why did this ingenious and ambitious novel — no less than a defense of the human imagination — leave me unmoved? [more]
Still interested? Read the first chapter here.
Will I still read the book? Probably. Enchantress falls within the looser bounds of fairy tale literature. But, based on the first chapter, I’m still not sure how I feel about it.
