The Enchantress of Florence

Before I water down this great work with my own thoughts, I feel that I should reproduce here for your edification the author biography on the inside cover:

Salman Rushdie is the author of nine previous novels: Grimus; Midnight’s Children (which was awarded the Booker Prize in 1981 and, in 1993, was judged to be the “Booker of Bookers,” the best novel to have won that prize in its first twenty-five years); Shame (winner of the French Prix de Meilleur Livre Etranger); The Satanic Verses (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel); Haroun and the Sea of Stories (winner of the Writers Guild Award); The Moor’s Last Sigh (winner of the Whitbread Prize for Best Novel); The Ground Beneath Her Feet (winner of the Eurasian section of the Commonwealth Prize); Fury (a New York Times Notable Book); and Shalimar the Clown (a Time Book of the Year). He is also the author of a book of stories, East, West, and three works of nonfiction. He is co-editor of Mirrorwork, an anthology of contemporary Indian writing.

If you are unable to tell from his astounding winner-of list, Salman Rushdie is a God of the Book. I am shocked and ashamed to say that The Enchantress of Florence was the first book I have ever read written by this deity, but that perhaps it will add to my redemption that I will be reading the Booker of Bookers very soon.

I first coveted this book when it arrived as a customer’s special order. I stood behind the counter at work and melted a little at the beautiful cover, then teased myself by reading the inside flaps [this was one book I could not wait until June 2009 to buy in paperback] and the first sentence.

“In the day’s last light the glowing lake below the palace-city looked like a sea of molten gold.”  So many ‘l’s to appreciate, drawing out the sentence long and seductively, with the long ‘o’s in molten gold sending a positive shiver down the spine.  Who thinks prose is not poetry has not read Rushdie.

One of my favorite plots is A Stranger Comes to Town; this book has two towns and two strangers. The story of the Enchantress, a woman of many names and mysterious beauty, is told by a traveler who comes to Sikri, the red capital of Akbar the Great, the emperor of the Mughal empire. The stranger, self-styled “Mogor dell’Amore” or the Mughal of Love, and who also happens to wear a really awesome coat, slowly enchants the city of Sikri with the story of a woman who enchanted the city of Florence. The double story lines interweave seamlessly and, in what may be the truest praise of all, keep one guessing until the very end.

Full of court intrigue, with all the sex, profanity, blasphemy, and violence of the wealthy and powerful, The Empress of Florence contains not only adventure but philosophy – as any reader can expect from a book with Machiavelli as a supporting character. With elegant, vivid history, urgent questions into the nature of power and individuality, and the charm of not one but two (or possibly three) imaginary women, this novel is a literary achievement: the awards it must win will not suffice for the enchantment of reading it.

Sadly, the customer with excellent taste has not yet picked up this masterpiece.  I only hope she regrets the time she left it languishing unread in our special orders cabinet.

Le Morte d’Art

The other day at work, a young man comes in and asks me to recommend a book that’s set in the South, “like To Kill a Mockingbird.” It turns out that his girlfriend likes to read, and enjoyed Harper Lee as well as The Jungle by Upton Sinclair.

I was, of course, overcome with delight. Here at last, I think to myself, will my degree in English help serve humanity by broadening and wisening the minds of my generation.

The books I recommended for being set in the South, or in the 1920s-1940s were:

1. A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor.
2. A Lesson Before Dying by Ernest J. Gaines.
3. Their Eyes Were Watching God by Zora Neale Hurston.
4. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith.
5. The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald.
6. Roll of Thunder, Hear My Cry by Mildred D. Taylor.
7. Mockingbird, a biography of Harper Lee.

The books I recommended for being like Upton Sinclair were:

1. Oil by Upton Sinclair.
2. The Road and No Country for Old Men by Cormac McCarthy.
3. Animal Farm by George Orwell.
4. The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver.

These books were naturally limited to what I knew we had on the shelves, and what I could think of in the space of five minutes. I may have ever so slightly overpowered the customer with my enthusiasm, because he said, “I guess I’ll think about it,” wandered around for about two more minutes, and left.

I was truly disheartened. I thought I had made some excellent recommendations (“If she likes X, then she’ll like Y, and here’s why.”)  I rarely ever take things personally at work because I know it makes no sense, but I do like to do a little suggestive selling.  (“Oh, you like Frances Mayes.  Well, have you heard of Marlena de Blasi?  She has a memoir of travels in Italy too, and it’s great.”)  But I was pretty glum after all the beautiful books, which I held out eagerly for reception, were all rejected.

So I consoled myself thinking of all the stupid things the customer was going to buy his girlfriend now.  I bet he’s going to get her a CD when she could have had Gatsby.  Or probably he will buy her a butterflies bookmark from Wal-Mart with a tassel that will break.  Or maybe some chocolate so that she’ll gain weight.  Or maybe he’ll eat the chocolate himself and gain weight, and his girlfriend will dump him for having no perspective and get her Ph.D. in American Literature.

Needless to say, it can get pretty slow at the bookstore sometimes.