Enchanting

I've finally finished Salman Rushdie's The Enchantress of Florence, which is both enchanting and infuriating. Rushdie creates an amazingly rich world blending history, fantasy, and myth, a world so enchanting that it is impossible to imagine an end, so it's inevitable that any ending would be disappointing, and Rushdie's is doubly so--a lush, baroque plot rushes suddenly to a lame, unsatisfying conclusion. That's the infuriating part.

But it is an amazing book. The novel explores the public hunger for myth, the sort of hunger that today inspires cable news networks to cast every petty newsmakers as epic hero or villain. Rushdie suggests that the human desire for myth functions just fine even when the only means of transmission is word of mouth: "Plainly Lady Black Eyes was becoming all things to all people, an exemplar, a lover, an antagonist, a muse; in her absence she was being used as one of those vessels into which human beings pour their own preferences, abhorrences, prejudices, idiosyncrasies, secrets, misgivings, and joys, their unrealized selves, their shadows, their innocence and guilt, their doubts and certainties, their most generous and also most grudging response to their passage through the world." Few know better than Rushdie that in order to become a vessel for the public's hopes and fears, one must first be reamed out, emptied, scoured, and possessed.

The idea of possession recurs throughout the book, with characters becoming possessed by hungers for passion, power, and poetry. The protagonist is a compulsive storyteller who "had picked up languages the way most sailors picked up diseases; languages were his gonorrhea, his syphilis, his scurvy, his ague, his plague. As soon as he fell asleep half the world started babbling in his brain, telling wonderous travelers' tales." Even when he finds himself in a dark dungeon slithering with vermin, his greatest fear is that he will die without telling his story: "He found this thought intolerable and so it refused to leave him, it crawled in and out of his ears, slid into the corners of his eyes and stuck to the roof of his mouth and to the soft tissue under his tongue."

While the ability to create a fluid universe of narrative eventually elevates the storyteller into a position of power (however temporary), other characters illustrate that narrative creativity is not the only way to win political favor. Sometimes success comes to those willing to disgorge the undigested contents of an excellent memory, those like Bakti Ram Jain, who "proudly held the rank of Imperial Flatterer First Class, and was a master of the ornate, old-school style known as cumulative fawning. Only a man with an excellent memory for the baroque formulations of excessive encomia could fawn cumulatively, on account of the repetitions required and the necessary precision of the sequencing."

Such playful moments have been fleeting in Rushdie's recent novels, but The Enchantress of Florence bubbles over with delight in the intricacies of the English language and the follies of the human condition, as well as a wealth of playful allusions suggesting that Rushdie has drunk deeply from the Sea of Stories and served up a generous draught for his eager readers. I just wish it hadn't ended quite so quickly.

Bonus tidbit: "By the Caspian Sea the old potato witches sat down and wept," begins one chapter, but "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." Those who teach on my campus are laughing uproariously right now, but others don't get the joke. Every campus ought to come equipped with a pirouetting Khorasani!