After I read Midnight's Children, I went around thinking in the cadences and magic of Rushdie's prose for weeks. I don't know if the same will happen after The Enchantress of Florence - it's magical foreignness may be too far afield to take my own style captive again.
But I digress. Since I'd much rather read Rushdie than myself, I figure I would share some of my favorite passages from Enchantress, which is pretty and lush and bizarre and just absolutely all over the place, which is what I love most about Rushdie. He is large. He contains multitudes.
Perhaps Rushdie's overarching theme, here stated by the Florentine who is an enchanter in his own right: "This may be the curse of the human race. Not that we are so different from one another, but that we are so alike."
" 'For a woman to please a man,' the emperor said, 'it is necessary that' " and the list goes on and on. The Florentine "Mughal of Love" replies that well-bred women of Italy are not at all like this. " 'But the courtesan, she fulfills all your ideals, except, possibly, for the business about the stained glass.' 'Never make love to a woman who is bad with stained glass,' the emperor said solemnly, giving no indication of humorous intent. 'Such a woman is an ignorant shrew.' "
"Women have always moaned about men [...] but it turns out that their deepest complaints are reserved for one another, because while they expect men to be fickle, treacherous, and weak, they judge their own sex by higher standards, they expect more from their own sex - loyalty, understanding, trustworthiness, love - and apparently they have all collectively decided those expectations were misplaced." [In this instance, the spate of jealous animosity was cured by having all the women go naked for a day, so they could see each other for all their faults.]
And in the New World, "the ordinary laws of space and time did not apply," moving forward, backward, and at different speeds. A statement that could be applied to Rushdie's created world, where historical figures and magic and intrigue and the past and less-past all come weaving into and around one another.
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2 comments:
Your reaction to Rushdie is a big part of why I've stopped reading fiction (or at least cut back) of late. I've developed a voice in my work on my novel that I don't want to endanger by letting it get infected by another writer's voice. Of course reading less also leads to having more writing time which is a nice bonus.
That's very cool - I'd love to want to just write. But I just can't imagine giving up reading in order to do it! :)
Good luck!
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