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Before you read the book:
Salman Rushdie’s books are always a bit intimidating for me. I’m not sure why since I often enjoy them and don’t find them particularly difficult. It’s also not an effort to prolong the pleasure since I often don’t enjoy them. For whatever reason, then, The Enchantress of Florence (2008) was no exception to this intimidation trend. I didn’t read it right when it was released, though I’d picked it up several times. And though I’ve had it for a while since, I didn’t read it first on the Booker longlist. In fact, I almost deliberately held off reading it until the end. But when choosing which longlist title to read next, I picked it up and read the first few lines:
In the day’s last light the glowing lake below the palace-city looked like a sea of molten gold. A traveler coming this way at sunset – this traveler, coming this way, now, along the lakeshore road – might believe himself to be approaching the throne of a monarch so fabulously wealthy that he could allow a portion of his treasure to be poured into a giant hollow in the earth to dazzle and awe his guests.
Maybe it’s because I’d just read Child 44, but I was thirsty for some magical, stylish prose, so I decided to buck up and read the book!
Now, did the book keep up with its first page? Yes and no. For the first 120 pages (Part I) I loved it, maybe as much as anything I’ve recently read. Here we meet “the traveler” mentioned above, coming first by ship and then by land to Sikri, in Hindustan. But even more intriguing, at Sikri we meet King Akbar, Emperor of India in the late sixteenth century:
The emperor Abul-Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad, king of kings, known since his childhood as Akbar, meaning “the great,” and latterly, in spite of the tautology of it, as Akbar the Great, the great great one, great in his greatness, doubly great, so great that the repetition in his title was not only appropriate but necessary in order to express the gloriousness of his glory . . .
Akbar, however, is a king with an identity and philosophical crisis. Having always referred to himself in the first person plural, he begins to wonder what it must feel like to refer to himself as an “I.” And this leads him to further questions:
Was there then no essential difference between the ruler and the ruled? And now his original question reasserted itself in a new and startling form: if his many-selved subjects managed to think of themselves in the singular rather than plural, could he, too, be and “I”? Could there be an “I” that was simply oneself? Were there such naked, solitary “I”s burried beneath the overcrowded “we”s of the earth?
Akbar is ashamed of his warrior past, which goes back to Ghengis Kahn. Though he has a brutal streak in him, when he kills a man he wonders if he’s just killed the man who might have been his equal, someone he could talk to, the only man he could ever love. In continuing the intrigue, Rushdie then introduces the King’s great love, Jodha. Their story, it is said by all, will go down as one of the greatest love stories in history. She is the favorite of all of the King’s wives, having excellent servants and the best room, and all of the subjects love her. It’s almost a side point that she’s just a figment of Akbar’s imagination – a great way for Rushdie to introduce one of the major themes of this book: the power of storytelling and art.
Thus, in reality, while it is true that she does not exist, it is also true to say that she is the one who lives. If she did not, then over there, behind the high window, there would be nobody waiting for her return.
And Rushdie makes her feel real, though we know it’s all just empty air. While Akbar is away, she feels herself diminish and contemplates her nonexistence. When Akbar approaches, her pulse quickens. Akbar’s other wives are jealous of her – “Whe he was gone, at least, she ought to absent herself as well; she had no business to hang around with the actually existing.” In the midst of Akbar’s identity crisis, just as he attempts to use “I” when speaking to Jodha, enters the traveler, a stranger who hails from Medici Florence. The traveler brings a fantastic tale, suitable only for a king, a tale about the enchantress of Florence, Qara Köz. Jodha starts getting jealous when Akbar is distracted by the story of the enchantress.
Honestly, up to this point, I was on board with Rushdie, thoroughly enjoying the evocation of this magical place and time with his magical realism (even thinking, perhaps with some blasphemy, that it was as magical and pleasant as some passages in One Hundred Years of Solitude). I couldn’t wait for the intriguing themes to be played with in the last parts of the book – I was trusting Rushdie to follow through! Furthermore, up to this point, I also enjoyed the playful descriptions of the type of time period we’re looking at:
. . . during which time her brother and protector Babar galloped back and forth, winning battles, losing battles, gaining territory, losing it again, being attacked by his uncles, attacking his cousins, being rounded upon by his cousins, and attacking his uncles again . . .
But soon after Part I, about a paragraph is all, the the magic stopped for me. Here, the traveler begins to tell the King his story, but this story didn’t work for me. Perhaps the magical realism doesn’t fit, in my mind, under the rule of the Medicis. Perhaps I also was half in love with Jodha and thought the Enchantress should just leave Sikri alone.
I think it’s something else though. My major gripe with Midnight’s Children (though I still voted for it to win the Best of the Bookers last month) was the frequent lapses from the main story which went into an overly detailed, though fleeting, description of some analogue to a historic event. At least in that book, though, much of this was substantiated since the whole book was about the history. Here I didn’t feel like the stories embedded in stories furthered anything, even though the book is written, in part, to show the magic of storytelling. In contrast to Part I, these stories didn’t do it for me. I could have done without that Enchantress entirely (though apparently that Rushide thought she was a pretty important part of the book). Although Rushdie continued to slather these inner stories with magical details, the details didn’t seem substantiated by the stories themselves which felt strangely lifeless after the first part where even an imaginary Queen feels real and has a soul, where an artist falls so in love with his work that he enters it by painting himself into the frame.
The final chapter seemed at first to pick up the thread, and I hoped it would resolve some of the themes and help me get a better appreciation for the previous 180 pages. To an extent, it did, but not enough for me to finish the book happily. The inner stories just pulled the book too far into the deep for me. It was sad that, despite the quirky detail, in these inner stories all we get is a very brief survey of events in episodic speed to bolster something Rushdie thought would be clever.
Not that I usually mind Rushdie’s self-conscious cleverness, even when he shoves it in your face:
In those days Sikri was swarming with poets and artists, those preening egotists who claimed for themselves the power of language and image to conjure beautiful somethings from empty nothings . . .
I think he’s shown he’s got what it takes to be a remembered author, so I can take a bit of self-indulgence now and then. His style, though, showy, is still something to be reckoned with. And, after all, it’s loads better than all those authors trying to sound like Rushdie. But to me, after the first part, all this book was was self-indulgent. It was as if Rushdie had done a lot of research (which he admits to and shows in the long bibliography at the end) and just wanted to have some self-gratifying fun with what he’d learned. The story was promising, but for the last 200 pages I just wanted to get back to Sikri and forget the whole Enchantress of Florence bit.
I know that I’m not alone in my dislike of the book. Another reason I didn’t read the book right away was because most reviews I read were fairly negative if not spitefully so. One positive one I remember, though, was from the London Financial Times in April. There John Sutherland, judge of the Man Booker Prize in 1999 and Chair in 2005, said, “If The Enchantress of Florence doesn’t win this year’s Man Booker I’ll curry my proof copy and eat it.” Well, I agreed with the committee’s 1999 decision with Disgrace and I completely disagreed in 2005 with The Sea. I’m glad Sutherland’s not on it this year or it would be several years in a row that I didn’t even like the winner, let alone think there was a better book on the longlist!
After you read the book:
There are definitely some interesting things to discuss here: myth-making, culture-creation, the role of women in this older world. However, I will keep up with my efforts not to publish any potential spoilers on the main posts during Booker season because I don’t want to lead anyone to inadvertently discover something here that is so much more fun to discover in the book. But please, feel free to engage in these topics in the comments – just mark spoilers!
[This book was shortlisted for the Best of the Booker 2008. The other five are The Siege of Krishnapur, The Conservationist, Oscar and Lucinda, The Ghost Road, and Disgrace.]
Before you read the book:
After buying Midnight’s Children (1981) several years ago I often read the first three pages, excited for the day I would finally take the plunge and commit myself. I was really intimidated.
Then I actually started it four years ago for a class. The first 100 pages captivated me, right up until the point where Saleem is finally born. But then I didn’t make it more than two chapters into Part II. At the time, I was engaged to my wife to be, so my mind couldn’t concentrate on too much (I was not a productive reader during that time). Ever since I put the book down, though, I’ve felt guilty for not finishing it – not guilty because I got an A in the class but didn’t do the reading; guilty because I knew I had given up a good opportunity to study a modern classic with the benefit of a classroom discussion. Midnight’s Children has sat on my bookshelf all that time, still with its bookmark right before “Snakes and Ladders.”
When the Best of the Booker shortlist was announced I was excited to again have an excuse to read it. Why did I need an excuse? Well, some books are intimidating, especially the ones you’ve started and had reason to put back down. I’d seen what was on the other side of Saleem’s birth–Part II and on is a dense thicket of the political history (in abstractions) of a country I knew/know little about.
All the same, of the shortlist (which also includes The Ghost Road, The Siege at Krishnapur, Oscar and Lucinda, Disgrace, and The Conservationist) it was the last one I read. I think I did this because I knew I had to run out of excuses not to read the book. If there was another one to pick up which would also get me closer to the goal of reading the entire shortlist, I might have been tempted to put it down again. Fortunately, times have changes. Though I love my wife very much, I’m finding it easier to concentrate on other things now. I had no trouble staying focused on this amazing – if at times complicated and erudite and dense – book.
I was born in the city of Bombay . . . once upon a time. No, that won’t do, there’s no getting away from the date: I was born in Doctor Narlikar’s Nurisng Home on August 15th, 1947. And the time? The time matters, too. Well then: at night. No, it’s important to be more . . . On the stroke of midnight, as a matter of fact. Clock-hands joined palms in respectful greeting as I came. Oh, spell it out, spell it out: at the precise instant of India’s arrival at independence.
Saleem Sinai is one of 1001 midnight’s children, the children born during the first hour after India’s independence, though as first born of the 1001, he has special privileges and is neither younger than nor older than his country.
Rushdie’s writing is also ingenious. He can make otherwise mundane events seem mythical and magical. The narrative devices are also clever and effective: Saleem is telling the story while he cracks all over, leading to the “not with a bang but a wimper” ending; many parts are told as if in real time, with Saleem going on tangents while waiting for a character to arrive at a door; one of the main characters is Padma, a proxy for the reader at Saleem’s side, who asks questions about the story and sometimes causes Saleem to contradict himself. And what really impressed me: the intricacies and rhythm of the story-telling make it seem like this story has been passed down through generations. As it should, being the story of a nation.
It’s not all magic, however, but I attribute many of my problems with the book to my own failings. I am somewhat ignorant of the history of India, though many of my favorite books are Indian “po-co.” More knowledge of the minor but historical characters or the minor but historical events would have made the longer, more tedious center chapters a bit more bearable, if not more interesting. That is really the only flaw I found in the book–some of the paragraphs feel like whole chapters because of all of the intricate traipsings through history, and it feels like Rushdie is just afraid to leave anything out. Read several parts of chapter constructed from these kinds of paragraphs and I started drifting. Another problem with those dense parts is that they lose some of the magic of Rushdie’s prose. It feels like he’s just got to get the events out there, so while in many parts of the book I could enjoy the images, these parts were more like reading a clever textbook.
After you read the book:
Interestingly, there’s a twist right at the end of Part I: he’s switched at birth with Shiva, another child born at the same time. Saleem grows up in a well-to-do Muslim home while Shiva lives in the slums raised as a Hindu. There is more than that: Saleem’s true father is not even the man who thinks he’s Shiva’s father; most likely William Methwold, an Englishman, is Saleem’s true father, splitting Saleem into even more heritages, none of which he becomes aware of until later in the book, none of which he accepts, choosing instead to adopt the history and heritage as he learned it growing up. I found these ties to India’s past ingenious and Rushdie’s feelings about India’s present very interesting.
Furthermore, despite the rough, slow patches, the ending does not disappoint. It is reminiscent of the tone and style of James Joyce’s “The Dead,” which is fitting since Midnight’s Children, with all of its history condensed into one person, has been compared to Joyce’s Ulysses:
Yes, they will trample me underfoot, the numbers marching one two three, four hundred million five hundred six, reducing me to specks of voiceless dust, just as, in all goods time, they will trample my son who is not my son, and his son who will not be his, and his who will not be his, until the thousand and first generation, until a thousand and one midnights have bestowed their terrible gifts and a thousand and one children have died, because it is the privelege and the curse of midnight’s children to be both masters and victims of their times, to forsake privacy and be sucked into the annihilating whirlpool of the multitudes, and to be unable to live or die in peace.
Thanks to Indira Ghandi (who was still alive when the book was published! talk about nerve making the Prime Minister “the Widow” villain of the nation’s story – and, yes, did have a hair style that made half of her hair look white and half black) the children have all been stripped of their powers. One thousand one possibilities pulverized to dust. It’s not a hopeful ending. Not explicitly at least, though perhaps Padma (me, the reader), who has proposed marriage, really can turn this around. Then again, Padma, like myself, is naive and basically powerless in the face of so much history.
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