Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    Unavailable
    Enchantress of Florence
    Unavailable
    Enchantress of Florence
    Unavailable
    Enchantress of Florence
    Audiobook13 hours

    Enchantress of Florence

    Written by Salman Rushdie

    Narrated by Firdous Bamji

    4/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this audiobook

    Salman Rushdie is one of the world’s most revered literary masters, with a Booker Prize and two Whitbread Awards among his accolades. His unique brand of magic realism is particularly effective in The Enchantress of Florence, the story of a European traveler and the extraordinary tale he shares with 16th-century Mughal emperor Akbar the Great. The traveler claims to be the son of a Mughal princess forgotten by time. If his tale is true, what happened to the princess?
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherRecorded Books Audio
    Release dateJul 11, 2008
    ISBN9781436132985
    Unavailable
    Enchantress of Florence
    Author

    Salman Rushdie

    Salman Rushdie is the author of many acclaimed novels, including Midnight’s Children (winner of the Booker Prize and the Best of the Booker), Grimus, Shame, The Satanic Verses, Haroun and The Sea of Stories, The Moor’s Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown, The Enchantress of Florence, Luka and the Fire of Life, and Two Years Eight Months and Twenty-Eight Nights—and a collection of short stories: East, West. He has also published works of nonfiction, including Joseph Anton (a memoir of his life under the fatwa issued after the publication of The Satanic Verses), The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, and Step Across This Line—and co-edited the anthologies, Mirrorwork and Best American Short Stories. He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and a Distinguished Writer in Residence at New York University. A former president of PEN American Center, Rushdie was knighted in 2007 for services to literature.

    More audiobooks from Salman Rushdie

    Related to Enchantress of Florence

    Related audiobooks

    General Fiction For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Words Triumph

      Apr 2, 2023

      VICTORY CITY, by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape, $37) In his first interview since the horrific attack on him last August in New York, Salman Rushdie humorously observed, “I have always thought that my books are more interesting than my life. Unfortu

      2 min read

    • Article

      Shelf Life

      Nov 2, 2023

      I’m not sure if I can truly pinpoint the moment my new novel Once A Monster was born – but I can trace the history of some of its most important ingredients. As a boy, looking through an old illustrated book of Greek myths, and being at once captiva

      5 min read

    • Article

      Hook, Line And Sinker

      Oct 18, 2018

      Hook, Line And Sinker
      4 min read

    • Article

      Road To Perdition

      Jun 11, 2022

      Road To Perdition
      4 min read

    • Article

      Jan Morris

      Jun 15, 2018

      I have always rather envied the poet Ovid, who was banished from Rome by the emperor Augustus, you may remember, to a remote place called Tomis on the shores of the Black Sea. There he died, ten years later, and his exile has gone into legend and int

      17 min read

    • Article

      Inglish Like Us

      Dec 24, 2022

      Inglish Like Us
      4 min read

    • Article

      Antelope Dreams

      Feb 2, 2024

      Antelope Dreams
      4 min read

    • Article

      In Search of Lost Travels

      Jun 4, 2018

      In Search of Lost Travels
      9 min read

    • Article

      TALL, WIDE, and Piercing Eyes

      Mar 1, 2019

      TALL, WIDE, and Piercing Eyes
      7 min read

    • Article

      Mark Haddon’s Latest Curious Incident Sails the High Seas

      Jul 18, 2019

      Sex and attraction feature prominently throughout, as do birth and death, terror and violence—the stuff of life that hasn’t changed one bit over the eons. The post Mark Haddon’s Latest Curious Incident Sails the High Seas appeared first on The Millio

      5 min read

    • Article

      Worlds Of Ink And Paper

      Nov 22, 2022

      As a young girl, I still remember my dear mother, smile on her face, curled up with Family Circle magazine in her lap. She was engrossed in an article titled “Butternut Wisdom,” written by Gladys Taber. At my age, it didn’t mean a thing to me. But as

      6 min read

    • Article

      How To Write About Royalty

      Sep 24, 2018

      How To Write About Royalty
      3 min read

    • Article

      A Great Escape

      Oct 30, 2021

      The book’s scenario begins with early 18th century Delhi. Qaraar and Abeerah meet and blossom. Then Nadir Shah sounds the death knell of the Mughal empire in 1739, taking 700 elephants, 4,000 camels, 12,000 horses and palanquins loaded with Delhi’s t

      2 min read

    • Article

      Francis Spufford Vividly Recreates an 18th-Century New York in ‘Golden Hill’

      Jul 26, 2018

      Dear Reader, envision that Village which grew upon the southern strand of that isle of Manhattoes: a Lenape settlement purchased for 60 guilders and named for Amsterdam, later to be acquired by gunships of King James, and her wooden-legged governor r

      7 min read

    • Article

      Object Worlds and Inner States

      Jul 11, 2019

      Object Worlds and Inner States
      7 min read

    • Article

      Top 10 road novels | James Yorkston

      Oct 12, 2022

      As a travelling musician, I spend a fair bit of time on the road, and the possibilities such a lifestyle brings – a new bed every night, new friends every evening (hopefully) – makes it an obvious scenario in which to place a novel. Character not wor

      4 min read

    • Article

      Commonplace Book

      Sep 1, 2021

      If any question why we died, Tell them, because our fathers lied. —Rudyard Kipling, “Epitaphs of the War,” The Years Between, 1919 She consulted me, a glance, and said: “I think not anything off the wagon. It arrives too quickly. Let’s have somethi

      4 min read

    • Article

      In Paddy's footsteps

      Dec 14, 2022

      I wonder what Paddy Leigh Fermor would have made of it. The doyen of travel writers, a dedicated pedestrian who trudged across Europe from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople and always embraced St Augustine's creed of solvitur ambulando – it is so

      5 min read

    • Article

      A Fully-packed Book Case

      Aug 26, 2021

      THE QUESTION OF HOW MANY books to take on holiday is a vexed one. My formula (number of days x 2) has the beauty of simplicity, and has disappointment so neatly built into it that I need never face the truth of why I only got through half of one of t

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Call Of The Desert

      Jan 3, 2023

      T.E. Lawrence was taken by his guides to a ruin in the desert of North Syria. The Arabs believed that it had been built by a prince for his queen and that its clay had been kneaded with the essential oils of flowers. As Lawrence wrote in Seven Pillar

      3 min read

    • Article

      Hardback To Backpack

      Dec 30, 2020

      Hardback To Backpack
      3 min read

    • Article

      Five Poems

      May 1, 2019

      “My arm is so brown and so beautiful,” is a thought I haveas I’m about to turn off the lamp and go to sleep.I look at it a moment in the soft glow, and see it, briefly,as though it belonged to someone else. A reddishkind of brown, like a toasted almo

      7 min read

    Reviews for Enchantress of Florence

    4/5

    65 ratings63 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

    • 3/5
      The story starts slowly, but then gets better during the 4th chapter. But then it nosedives at chapter 10 when the story shifts to Italy or wherever the foreigner's background story was taking place. It got so confusing and impossible to follow. I suffered through all the remaining chapters, until chapter 19 arrived where the story was back to India and to its conclusion.
    • 5/5
      Magical. Excellent narrator. A journey into history untold. Two words.
    • 3/5
      Well, it wasn't quite what I'd hoped for. I read [book:The Ground Beneath Her Feet] years ago & really loved it. I was hoping that this book would be, at least, equally good. The lush language & the precise, exacting syntax were there, but I found the storyline inferior and, in places, too surreal.

      Ultimately, when put to the comparison test, the result is this: I finished The Ground Beneath Her Feet in a few days, whereas it's taken me slightly longer than a week to work through this much slimmer volume.

      I liked it, but I'm still disappointed.
    • 3/5
      A literary work with a fairy tale/fable feel to it. The book revolves around the interconnecting tales told by a young visitor to the Emperor Akbar and encompasses both the Ottoman and Moghul Empires and renaissance Florence. The tales are amusing, fantastical, historical, bawdy, and magical.
    • 4/5
      The story switches back and forth between India and Italy, and whilst I enjoyed the Indian scenes much more, the author has clearly done his research on Renaissance Italy (as a rather uncalled for bibliography at the end of the book attests). Rushdie remains a consummate wordsmith, and his sentences are filled with puns, alliterations, rhymes and rhythms that make you want to repeat them aloud and savour them. The chapter titles are the first words of its first sentence, and delightfully turn out to be constructed in metered verse.And that's just the crispy, shiny, yummy surface of this allegoric novel. East and West are continually confronted and compared on areas such as religious fanaticism or tolerance, freedom of speech and the lust for power. Princess Qara Köz is the personification of the Story (or even of Rushdie's forbidden works, in a narrower interpretation), who is revered or reviled by audiences in East and West. Her name means Black Eyes, yet it also reminds one of Karagöz or Karayiozi, the folk story figure in Turkey and Greece whose stories transcend boundaries, cultures and religions. Her peregrinations lead to some deep reflections (some explicit, others implied) on the enthralling power of storytelling and the importance of the right of free speech in a world where East and West clash over their alleged absolute truths. And even if you decide not to interpret the novel at this level, it is still a delightful tale.

      1 person found this helpful

    • 5/5
      This is a magnificent novel; a model of the perfect reading for a book group, or literature class. Rushdie creates and amazingly solid and well-crafted central plot, surrounded by parables and dreams, imbued with a deep multiplicity of meanings, that all flows like poetry."Enchantress" is a more focused version of Umberto Eco's "The Island of the Day Before". It has that same dream-like quality of stories flowing into and within other stories, but in Rushdie's case, anchored by a more stable threaded plot.The novel revolves around a mysterious European traveler, ostensibly from Florence, who finds himself at the court of an Indian ruler. The Florentine (who goes by numerous names) has a secret to tell...a secret that will kill all but one who are exposed by it. This secret is the fulcrum upon which this vibrant tale is balanced.Rushdie delves into themes of love, poetry, one-ness, leadership, gender, beauty, war, and the list goes on. I'm quite sure that I was only able to grasp but a small fraction of the delightfully nuanced story's multiple tiers of meanings. English majors will have an easier time dissecting the stories within the stories, but all readers will enjoy Rushdie's easy-flowing style.The first third of the novel takes place in India where the stage is set for the Florentine's secret. The second two thirds focus on Florence where Niccolo Machiavelli plays a significant role in unravelling the deadly secret.Each character represents a different quality of being or literate theme. Each clue to the mystery leads to a new tale, a new parable. These lead Rushdie, particularly in the early India-centered scenes, to create a bright atmosphere of story-clouds, drifting in and out from each other, composing a complete and satisfactory conclusion.I found myself looking forward to each reading session with 'Enchantress'. Rushdie's approach to building the story and themes developed a very comforting and pleasing read. While I wouldn't consider this 'light' reading, it's deeply layered story and almost poetic approach make this a wonderful book.
    • 5/5
      The publisher's blurb for The Enchantress of Florence does credit to the surface plot of the story. However, to read a Rushdie novel is all about depths, dimensions -- mirrors, if you will. And it is mirrors this novel addresses, from the handmaiden of the Enchantress herself, to relationships, histories, and philosophies. To read this novel is like looking at a mirror reflected in a mirror; the depths are infinite.There is the mirror of Qara Koz and her handmaiden, and again of that relationship reflected in the whores known as The Skeleton and The Mattress. There is the reflection of Jodha, Akbar the Great's conjured queen, in the reincarnation of Qara Koz. There are reflections of a menage a trois, of battles won and lost, of political maneuverings.As with any of Rushdie's work, he makes no apologies for expecting his readers to be fully engaged and all synapses firing. A light, escapist read this isn't; neither is it a plodding literary tome one feels obligated to read. Rushdie draws this huge cast of characters, many of them lifted directly from history, with a very realistic, human hand, and just when a narrative is in danger of becoming too self-important, his wit takes flight and brings all sensibilities back to the common man. Even while his writing is without peer, in this novel he also created such pathos that in the end, for me, there were tears. This is a fascinating read from a literary, an historical, and a plain old entertaining perspective.
    • 3/5
      Rushdie is having a great deal of fun here, bit the problem is I suspect he had more fun writing it than I did reading it. Of course, Rushdie's a wonderful writer -- one can hardly dispute that -- but this is not the most wonderful of books, no matter how dazzling and lush and sense-drunk it is. The plot is spectacularly convoluted and I admit to not being able to follow all of it. I was often lost, wondering who the hell this character was and what name they were going by now, for certainly names do get changed a lot here. It's magical and poetic, and depicts times and places that probably never really existed outside fairy tales and opera stages, which is fine, but Rushdie seems SO pleased with himself at every turn of succulent phrase, that it felt more self-indulgent than truly wondrous. At this point in his career, Rushdie can perhaps be excused a little frolic for his own pleasure and certainly if you find yourself lolling about on silk cushions on a warm afternoon wishing to be lulled into an opium-like dream, there are worse choices for the reader.
    • 5/5
      The Enchantress of Florence is the 10th book by Salman Rushdie. Set amongst the extremes and excesses of Renaissance Florence and in the city of Fatehpur Sikri in Mughal India, it tells the story of a hidden Mughal princess, Princess Qara Köz, the Lady Black Eyes, also known as Angelica, who had the ability to enchant both men and women. The story is told to the Hindustan Emperor Abul-Fath Jalaluddin Muhammad Akbar, The Grand Mughal, grandson of Babar, by a Florentine storyteller dressed in a long patchwork cloak made up of bright harlequin lozenges of leather, the yellow haired Niccoló Antonino Vespucci, who called himself Mogol dell’Amore, and seems also to be an enchanter. Akbar, listening to him, thought: “…that witchcraft requires no potions, familiar spirits or magic words. Language upon a silvered tongue affords enchantment enough.” This tale abounds with battles won and lost, villains and heroes, slaves and sultans, soldiers and sailors, witches and magic, lovers real and imaginary; the Medicis, Machiavelli, Argalia, various Vespuccis and Vlad the Impaler all make an appearance. While Rushdie’s usual wordplay and much of his magical reality are absent, this novel is full of luscious prose; there is much rich detail, the characters are memorable and the plot is excellent; it had some of the feel of Haroun and the Sea of Stories. I enjoyed this book much more than either Midnight’s Children or the Moor’s Last Sigh.
    • 3/5
      This book was weird. I think I misunderstood the synopsis on the back, but it definitely wasn’t about what I thought. The fantasy part made it hard to understand what was going on when. I think this is one of those books you have to read twice to really get what was going on. The writing was very good, and the images that were painted in my mind at times were extremely vivid.
    • 4/5
      Historical fiction with a bit of fantasy that floats between India and Italy. I liked the characters, but the writing style made this a slow read for me.
    • 3/5
      'The Hindustani storyteller always knows when he loses his audience (...). Because the audience simply gets up and leaves, or else it throws vegetables, or, if the audience is the king, it occasionally throws the storyteller headfirst off the city ramparts.' (p. 120) - I got up several times but always came back, bringing a new supply of vegetables, just in case. Wonderful passages of storytelling, yet somehow unfinished.
    • 5/5
      This was a zesty book. A yellow haired fair skinned man parades into the court of the Moghul Emperor with the claim that he is the emperors uncle. The story of his origins spans the entire known world, centering in Moghul India and Florence Italy with the focal point of CaraCuz, Lady Dark Eyes, the most beautiful enchanting princess the world has known and a cast of three loyal friends - Il Machia, Ago Vespucci, and Argalia the Turk.Beautifully written prose with epic and colorful details. Lots of fun tracing the characters heroics and paths as they criss-cross East/West.
    • 4/5
      I admit I was a bit intimidated by Salman Rushdie and expected his work to be dense and deeply philosophical. I was only partly right. I did have to focus on the read but it was a pleasure to dive into his long, swirling thoughts and richly embroidered descriptions. The power of love was at times magical in a way that reminded me of Gabriel Garcia Marquez or Laura Esquivel. The intricate story traverses hundreds of years throughout Asia and Europe and as such it can be hard to follow occasionally, but it's worth the work to unravel it.
    • 1/5
      I really wanted to like this book. Rushdie is unlike any other writer; his descriptive magic realism is without peer and his stories are wholly original while remaining approachable and familiar. But what works in his earlier masterworks doesn't work here in Enchantress. The magical tendencies of the plot seem forced, as though Rushdie had two really great ideas and didn't quite know how to connect them.If this book wasn't the product of one of the best living writers of sumptuously descriptive fiction, I'd swear that the author paid a vanity press to print it.
    • 5/5
      Excellent novel weaving the historical and the fantastical. Rushdie is truly one of the best and I'd love to re-read and keep this novel in e-book form.
    • 5/5
      I'm a big fan of all of Rushdie's works which I have read, but this has got to be one of my favorites. It combines history, myth, and magic so well that after finishing the book I just wanted to learn more... turns out the history of it isn't nearly so exciting. All I can say is READ THIS BOOK!!! It's a masterpiece.
    • 5/5
      Magic, in his oriental mysticism. Interesting even it's historic references.
    • 5/5
      An amazing book. This was the first book that I read by Rushdie and was not disappointed one bit. If anything the book exceeded my already high expectations. The book melds history and magic in an awe inspiring manner. In lesser hands the book might have turned out to be a disaster but Rushdie plays with time, characters and words effortlessly. A masterpiece to say the least. The characters stay with you long after you turn the last page. Amazingly each arc is self sufficient but all the arcs segue effortlessly into each otherLooking forward to read his other books.
    • 2/5
      It's the first Salman Rushdie I've ever read and I had high hopes about finding a deep, meaningful and well thought out story in carefully crafted language. The opposite was true. From the first sentence of the novel you're wading in a pool of mellifluous language and are bathing in a bubbling bath of warmly poured narrative. I'm paraphrasing the type of content you will find. The choice of language neatly fits the story of the novel, in which we follow three childhood friends from Florence during the high renaissance. Each man approaches life in a very different way and we learn how each path comes with its own rewards and punishments. Throughout this ongoing rambling there is a cast of fairy tale-like characters that interweave with the main narrative. A Persian emperor contemplates his power and his many splendid wives. His wives contemplate the power of the emperor and his many splendid guests, one of which is a linguistic magician from Florence who turns out to be one of our fine adventurous friends.And then of course there is the enchantress of Florence, also the enchantress of the emperor, the enchantress of the three friends and in the end just as unenchanting and uninteresting as the rest of the people that inhabits Rushdie's world (I wonder if he wrote this after he was dumped by his supermodel wife). With this novel the author ironically falls into the same trap as many current Hollywood producers: if you go hyperbole on everything the box-office earnings will also be proportionally over the top. This might even work for the LA sharks but when it comes to a writer whom we expect to deliver amazing content, the result is rather disappointing. If you make the leading characters larger than life and spend every single sentence describing the amazing, tremendous, breathtaking, breath stopping, breath giving, life giving and most of all God/Goddess-like qualities of your protagonists, then if you want to make them seem human you will need to show an equally dark side. This Rushdie does not do and instead ends the novel by demurely describing how boring and ordinary everyone in his novel really is, something the reader has already figured out from the first page.I was so surprised by the strangely disappointing narrative and plot of this book that I started searching for other reviews. As it turns out mine is rather nice compared to other people who do not have many nice words to say (I'm thinking of the New York Times review) It is almost as if Rushdie is either tired of writing or so over-confident that he now thinks he can get away with using all the tropes we're told we should never be using in our own writing. Weeks after I finished the book I still remember a sentence from the New York Times review in which the reviewer wondered if there was still anyone who used sentences that described someone as having a 'silvery tongue'.
    • 5/5
      A wonder of a book. It's intricate story drew me in, and I was lost. The interweaving tales fascinated me, and Rushdie's language was beautiful without being overwhelming. It was magical.
    • 4/5
      Magic realism is compelling in this intriguing story set in Florence and India perhaps 500 years ago. Characters are many, larger than life and hard to keep track of.
    • 5/5
      Rushdie tells three stories and combines them into a beautiful, magical whole.
    • 5/5
      Purchased in Thailand and read on the beaches in Thailand - perfect holiday read.
    • 4/5
      There is no doubt that Salman Rushdie has a way with words. He is capable of writing devastatingly gorgeous prose, but in this offering, despite the wordsmithing, he didn't twine his narratives together well enough to have the whole hang together quite like he's capable of doing. I first read Rushdie when I was in graduate school. Midnight's Children was a complete revelation. It was stunning and impressive and made me rush right out to buy everything else he'd written to that point. Not too long after that came the fatwa over The Satanic Verses and in my usual modus operandi ("if it's causing a kerfuffle or being banned, I must buy it and support the author"), I zipped out and purchased that too despite not being terribly intrigued by the premise. I finally read it last year. And it bored me silly. So Mr. Rushdie had hit both ends of the reading experience spectrum for me, high and low. Perhaps then, it makes sense that this read was middle of the road. He's just covering all his bases.The novel opens with a yellow-haired traveler making his way towards the great city of Mughal Emperor Akbar. Calling himself the Mogor dell'Amore, this character is the thread that will ultimately weave the seemingly disparate story lines together. There is the storyline of Akbar and his imaginary wife, the story of three boys in Florence, and the story of the eponymous Enchantress of Florence, Qara Koz. In each of the story lines, especially as they come closer and closer to converging, Rushdie is clearly playing with apparent opposites: East and West, real and imagined, history and fiction. But he is also highlighting the similarities among things so seemingly different.Our yellow-haired stranger in his patchwork coat of many colors tells a tale to Akbar, the tale of a forgotten Mughal princess who left the East for the West and was subsequently scrubbed from history. Is his tale true and if so, what impact will it have on the court of Akbar? There are multiple side narratives threading through the recounting of Qara Koz's life and Rushdie often interrupts his own narrative with asides to pull the reader out of the haze into which our storyteller has carefully led us. These textual interruptions, and indeed the many allusions (many of which I am certain I missed) scattered throughout, bring the reader up short, always pointing to the fictional and illusory nature of both this story and the story within the story.Somehow, even with all the dazzling sleight of hand by Rushdie, ultimately the story was a little flat. Despite Qara Koz gaining in solidity throughout the telling of her story, she never came across as a fully realized character. She remained transparent, merely showing others through the lens of her actions rather than becoming the focus herself. Was this intentional and I've missed the point? Perhaps. I enjoyed the novel while in Akbar's city far more than I did once the setting changed to Florence and the maneuverings of the Medici family. The Mughal empire was more richly evoked than Florence, at least for me. It was clever to use real, historical people in this fictional investigation into the idea of the real versus the created but perhaps the novel wandered too far and wide to entirely and successfully pull off whatever ambitious intention Rushdie had for it. An interesting read, I was left feeling a bit let down despite recognizing Rushdie's undoubted brilliance.
    • 4/5
      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.
    • 4/5
      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.)
    • 4/5
      It’s a story where men can bring their dreams alive as well as escape into them. The story, including all the little details, is quite beautiful and I loved how it seemed like such a fairy tale.There were lots of little hidden jokes and meanings in the text. I'm sure that I didn't pick up on them all. For example, in the beginning, the Emperor fights the ruler of the kingdom of Kuch Nahin, which means "nothing". The Kingdom of Nothing. I also liked how he made the distinction between Jodha Bai and Mariam-uz-Zamani. Mariam was his real wife while Jodha Bai was a phantom. I interpret this to be Rushdie's way of pointing out how the historical figure which people call Jodha Bai was never Jodha Bai - the name was incorrectly given to Mariam-uz-Zamani much later and so this is why Jodha Bai is a fictional being while Mariam is very real.I didn't like the parts that took place in Italy. I thought they were a little boring and a little complicated. I mostly enjoyed the parts that took place in the Mughal Court.
    • 4/5
      I read this at the same time I was reading Bonk. Strangely, they worked together. Where Mary Roach is funny and straight forward in a science kind of way, Rushdie is funny and extravagant in a magic-realism kind of way. I realize there is a whole segment of the population out there who think that Rushdie is a pompous, overblown, overrated blow-hard. And it's true. But there's also a segment of the population who thinks he's one of the greatest living writers, artistic and a genius. And it's true. I'm a believer in both.Although at it's essence, it's a fairy-tale, it also has got enough historical nuggets in it to make it interesting on a historical level. Also, there's enough sex to keep it lively. Which is always good. Both sex AND livliness. Mercifully, it's shorter than Midnight's Children, although part of me also wanted to leisurly linger on it and take my time going through it, rather than hammering all the way to the end like a man on a mission. As I said, I read this the same time while reading Bonk. Pick up both today!
    • 4/5
      I’m glad I finally got around to picking up a Rushdie book. On a sentence level, I was utterly delighted. On a wider-story level, I enjoyed the main plot. However, however... The book is in part about a woman called Qara Koz who attempts to make her own path in life. To do this, she must fall in love with various men as needed to help her. While I appreciated the mercenary nature of her love, I found it irritating that she must ~love~ all of these men, utterly and completely, rather than coldly use them (or some of them -- I can understand falling in love accidentally, but immediately every time?) I suspect Rushdie was trying to show, with her reliance on men, that a woman in that time had no other option. Why she had to love them all, I don’t know. (Women are incapable of being cold mercenaries? Uugh.) Equally I’m not sure what he was trying to show by never really giving her a viewpoint. Her story is told by men. This bothers me immensely. It also means that while her base motive (‘I must survive’) is pretty transparent, other actions are less clear. Why, exactly, does she feel the need to work her magic on Florence and make it so wonderful? I guess it could tie into her need to survive -- making the city wonderful ensures people won't boot her out -- but it would have been nice to hear this from ~her~. Nevertheless, I found this book quite interesting (it had repeating motifs, a fascinating setting, lush descriptions and some good characters). Defintitely worth a read, and I intend to seek out more of Rushdie's work.