FAVORITE FICTION OF 2008
The Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
“In the caravanserai all was bustle and hum,” begins an evocative central passage in Salman Rushdie’s adventurous The Enchantress of Florence as workers and planners, blacksmiths and carpenters industriously go about their jobs to keep up trade and transit between the East and the West, as do turbaned coolies in red shirts and dhotis who run “ceaselessly hither and yon with bundles of improbable size and weight” upon their heads, while animals run wild, including screechy monkeys, and shrieking parrots exploding like “green fireworks in the sky.”
Such a multitudinous but often impenetrable narrative — couched in a magical realist every-which-way-but-lucid fever dream — often makes this tale of two epochs more commotion and drone than bustle and hum. But there’s still a lot of poetry in motion, and we’re talking about more than Bekin’s man prosody as Rushdie plops his unrushed plots in two tantalizing settings: sixteenth-century Renaissance Florence and Mughal India's cultural zenith reached the following century at Emperor Akbar's court in Sikri.
Be patient: there is a connecting link between the two cities and times, and just as compelling as the circuitous journeys and destinations are the main characters driving the plot-thickened storyline, and the equally captivating secondary personalities and historical figures.
Indeed, such reflections often come and go with the dazzling displays of ideas, wordplay, whimsy, and poetic passages that ebb and flow, keeping afloat Rushdie’s mixture of historical research, philosophical quests, and interest in myth and folklore.
Overall, The Enchantress of Florence is a rewarding dialogue of sorts, back and forth over the decades and across thousands of miles between, for example, Machiavelli, brooding over the nature of power and morality in sensual, humanist Florence; and the troubled Akbar, pondering the same mysteries in the hedonistic Mughal capital. And who knows - maybe he’s thinking about lighting for the territories, too.
DISENCHANTMENT OF 2008
The Widows of Eastwick by John Updike
Readers of The Widows of Eastwick may be more bothered and bewildered than bewitched. John Updike’s latest novel is a belated but lackluster sequel of sorts to 1984’s The Witches of Eastwick, a tale of how three kid-tested, mother-approved witches unwittingly summon forth the man of their nightmares and, with a little help from the devil in the deadly details, wreak havoc and hell in a small New England town.
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