As usual, there is a world that is entirely and absolutely rushdie's own world, with its own, er, intricasies and obsessions. It own portraits and moorings. And as usual, Rushdie thrills and amazes with his rampant rumbustious imagination, his soprao of words and his won presentation of history. He has carefully observed the holes in history and has filled them with his own fantastical cravings, and this book is as much about the author as it is about Arcalia collecting semen from a dead bishop's dick, the latter hung naked from a wall, so that he might use it to grow a mandrake root.
But there is little of the old whirlind of history, the feeling of something crumbling beneath your feet. Mere impressionism carries this book forward. Moreover at 443 pages, this one of rushdie's slighter works. And yet it well ahead of many of his colleagues and definitely a lot better than the sacrileage of this year's Booker Prize winner. ( )

Salman Rushdie is a wonderful writer of sentences. This book begins: "In the day's last light the glowing lake below the palace-city looked like a sea of molten gold." The rhythm, the alliteration, the assonance, everything works together to make the reader smile and linger. But then it continues: "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. And as big as the lake of gold was, it must be only a drop drawn from the sea of the larger fortune–the traveler’s imagination could not begin to grasp the size of that mother-ocean! Nor were there guards at the golden water’s edge..." And he goes on in this vein for a long paragraph before returning to the stranger in his bullock-cart. This pretty much sums up the novel itself; if you don't mind being dragged off on whatever tangent Rushdie feels like exploring at the moment, and if you're not too picky about what's real and what's not, you'll do fine, but if you want a believable plot that can be followed without too much trouble, this may not be the book for you.

very engaging. intelligent and at times moving. ( )

The Enchantress of Florence opens at dusk, with the arrival of a thirsty blond European traveler at the court of the Emperor Akbar. It is late in the 15th Century and the beautiful stranger, dressed in an unusual leather multi-pocketed patchwork coat, has come to tell the Emperor a magical, compelling story. It’s an auspicious beginning and beautifully wrought, full of characterisation created partly by setting, and the kind of sensory overload that Rushdie has become known for.As always, Rushdie manages to go beyond the here and now into a world full of synthesesia: smells, sights, sensations, longing, hunger, fear, colour, place and emotion mingling until there’s almost too much for the reader to take in. Clearly there were rich pickings for Rushdie in Akbar's wealthy Mughal world, where the man known as the "greatest of the Mughal emperors" commanded more than simply his subjects. In The Enchantress of Florence Akbar's imagination and power are so great that he can conjure a queen out of nothing and raise the dead. His musings on life, his kingdoms, the responsibilities of leadership, and even the nature of migration are powerfully thought-provoking.In many ways, The Enchantress of Florence is a story about the story: a metafiction that looks at the line between invention and reality and crosses it. It may seem like a magical fairy tale, but psychologically, invention is behind most of our reality. We are all locked, to a certain extent, in our own perceptions, so the man or women we love is always partly determined by how we’ve created them in our own minds. History too, is never entirely factual. There are always imaginings, templates, perspectives, and shades that can never be black or white. This is the notion that Rushdie plays with in The Enchantress of Florence, and like many modern novelists, he does it in the guise of historical fiction, rather than the other way around. The invention drives the research and the facts, so that it’s innate truths about love, power, fear, and desire that push the story forward, rather than the research behind the real Akbar.Fictional imperative aside however, there was clearly a lot of research done for this story. In addition to Akbar the Great, there’s a veritable laundry list of famous people on parade through this novel, from Lorenzo de’ Medici, Machiavelli, Savonarola, Botticelli, Andrea Doria, and even Elizabeth the I. Each of these figures has his own story and a multiplicity of names and incarnations; enough to create a novel from each of them. Clustered here as they are, amidst a completely different story, their inclusion comes across as a series of unnecessary asides, detracting from the already dense main tale of Akbar, the blond stranger who calls himself the Mogor dell'Amore, and the mysterious black-eyed Enchantress Angelica, or Qara Köz. There’s so much material already in their East-West dance and the clash and connections, that there’s really no need to include so many additional stories. The inclusions come across as incidental in a story that is already ambitious and complex.In addition to the density of its characters and the many subplots and sub-stories, the language of the book also threatens to overwhelm it. It’s partly Rushdie’s natural style to have breathlessly rich run-on sentences, but he goes further in this novel than he has before. At times The Enchantress of Florence bows under the weight of its verbosity.Despite the linguistic heavy-handedness, the story does move along, impelled by the powerful musings of Akbar, and the natural desire to see how the Enchantress will sort out her own destiny. Or whether the Enchantress even exists. There’s a kind of quantum science underpinning her role in this novel that’s tremendously evocative. Is she sprung from Akbar, or he from her? Who is the parent and who the child? Who is real and who is a fiction? Like Schrödinger's Cat, Qara Köz is both alive and dead simultaneously. Rushdie’s handling of dichotomy in this novel, as in all of his novels, remains masterful. Life and death; East and West; male and female; real and imaginary; civilization and barbarism; permanence and change, are all managed with a deftness that few other novelists could handle.If The Enchantress of Florence were expertly edited, and I’m afraid that few would dare edit someone of Rushdie’s caliber to the extent required, it could have been a masterpiece. As it is, it’s an enjoyable, but convoluted novel that takes on a difficult and fascinating historical subject matter and turns it into something entirely modern. Shortfalls aside, there are few who have the kind of literary skill that Rushdie has. As he himself puts it, “Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.”

My initial review disappeared off the site, but in summary Rushdie writes beautifully his words paint wonderful pictures each works of art in and of themselves, but taken as a whole do not always hold together. I will read him again because of his artistry, but hope that he winds a tighter plot on his next go round. (I must say that this is the first time LT has lost a review, not sure what happened.) ( )