The Enchantress of Florence, Salman Rushdie

The Enchantress of Florence is all about a Florentine stranger who comes to the court of Mughal emperor Akbar the Great (heehee, get it?) with a story to tell.  He claims that he is Akbar’s uncle (ish), the son of a great-aunt Akbar never knew existed.  It’s a bold claim, but the stranger is a bold man; and in the days that follow, he entrances Akbar with the story of three Italian friends (including Machiavelli because, you know, it’s Salman Rushdie, and why not?), and the parts they played in the tale of the stranger’s purported mother, the “hidden princess” Qara Koz.

There are so many reasons that I loved this book.  One is that I love Salman Rushdie.  I read Midnight’s Children out of a sense of obligation, and I was surprised at how fun and playful it was, even when it was dark.  Salman Rushdie and his love affair with words make me smile, because although I am not brilliant with them like he is, I too have great love for The Words.  Like this, talking about the Florentine stranger:

Indeed, he turned out to be quite the conjurer.  He transformed gold coins into smoke and yellow smoke back into gold.  A jug of resh water flipped upside down released a flood of silken scarves.  He multiplied fishes and loaves with a couple of passes of his elegant hand, which was blasphemous, of course, but the hungry sailors easily forgave him.  Crossing themselves hastily, to insure themselves against the possible wrath of Christ Jesus regarding the the usurpation of his position by this latter-day miracle worker, they gobbled up their unexpectedly lavish, if theologically unsound, lunch.

Then also, I love that what the book is really about is the power of stories.  The people in Florence and Sikri can be taken over by words, not just the mob but the rulers, taken over by the stories they tell each other about the main characters in the book.  She’s a patron saint, she’s a witch; he’s a great emperor, he’s incestuous – the stories make all the difference.  I like that.  I expect that if you were Salman Rushdie, and you had spent loads of years in hiding because of a story you had written, that would be a fairly inescapable theme for your books.  Actually, this stories thing, what story you believe and why, also gives rise to the only complaint I had with the book.  Spoilers ahead.

Akbar’s problem throughout the story is that the stranger’s timing is all wrong.  He couldn’t be Akbar’s uncle and be the age that he is, and at the end of the tale the stranger tells him that his mother, the beautiful Qara Koz, found a way to stop time in herself, so that she didn’t age the way others did.  Akbar’s trust in the stranger is broken.  He tells him no, that isn’t what happened, that’s impossible, he can’t believe it.  He tells him that Qara Koz had a daughter, and died, and the daughter then slept with her own father to produce the stranger, and that’s what happened, and he makes him leave the kingdom, for lying and being the product of incest.  And the stranger keeps saying, no, she stopped time; and I liked it all vague.  I wanted it to stay vague.  But then at the end Qara Koz shows up, brought into being by the telling of the story and the belief in the story, and tells the emperor what really happened.  Boo.  I liked it vague.  The book’s about the power of believing in the story you believe in!  It would have been more better if we had gotten to decide ourselves, like Life of Pi.

However, I am not the boss of Salman Rushdie, and apart from that, which all happened in the last ten pages or so, The Enchantress of Florence was lovely and fun and gorgeously written, my favorite of his since The Ground Beneath Her Feet.

(Oh, yes, and also, can I just say, and this has bugged me for a while even though I do like Salman Rushdie a lot – what is with the women in his books?  Salman Rushdie’s women are always there sort of for men in a way that the men aren’t for women, and I’m tired of it.  Write a more interesting woman once in a while!  We are very interesting!)

Other thoughts: S. Krishna’s Books, Asylum, Adventures in Reading, Shelf Love, Eve’s Alexandria, Books for Breakfast, Both Eyes Book Blog

Dream Country, Neil Gaiman

Evidently the stress of writing a nice coherent plot in The Doll’s House proved temporarily too much for Neil Gaiman, and he took a break to write some single-issue self-contained stories.  And these are some damn good stories.  Except I don’t like “Façade”.  I remember not liking it so um, I sort of skipped it this time.  I know!  I could read “24 Hours” but not “Façade”?  I don’t know what’s wrong with me.

No, actually, I know exactly why I did that.  Lately I’ve been getting ready for bed around eight, then lying in bed reading for several hours.  I collect three or four books that I might feel like reading, climb up onto my bed (it’s a loft bed, so once I’m up there, I’m generally too lazy to come down before morning), and read until I can’t keep my eyes open anymore.  And last night, when I was reading Dream Country, I had Season of Mists sitting enticingly on the pillow.  So when I got to “Façade”, I just couldn’t stand the idea that there was this one story – a story I don’t even like – standing between me and the first issue of Season of Mists, probably my favorite single issue from a complete storyline (as compared with the self-contained stories), because I love it when the Endless all get together and hang out (though I hate how Delirium is drawn in this one).

Now I feel guilty.  I will probably go back and read “Façade” this evening, out of guilt.

Anyway, the other three stories are very, very good.  I like “Calliope” the best.  It’s not that I don’t like the other two – I do – but I just like “Calliope” way the best.  “Dream of a Thousand Cats” is a smidge too – I don’t know, I think it takes itself a tiny bit too seriously, considering how whimsical a story it is.  And “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” is gorgeous and delightful, and no wonder it won a prize, but I am not in love with Sandman’s treatment of Shakespeare.  I love Shakespeare.  AND HE WAS NOT FRANCIS BACON AND HE DID NOT MAKE A DEAL WITH DREAM AND HE WAS A GENIUS BY HIMSELF OKAY?

Calm down, Jenny.

Anyway, I think “Calliope” is great.  I adore the brief one-panel vignettes you see of Richard Madoc – chatting up a girl at a party and telling her he does consider himself a feminist writer – then going home to the woman he’s keeping prisoner so he can be a genius.  And as well, this story casts Dream in a better light than we’ve really seen him.  His last two encounters with women haven’t been nice: condemning Nada to hell forever and ditching Lyta Hall all pregnant and despairing.  I’m always glad to see him being helpful to Calliope and screwing up Madoc’s life permanently – though without the vindictiveness I would have expected.  (This is change on his part.  Watch how it will remain a theme.)

Next up: Season of Mists.  I love Season of Mists.  It was my favorite for a few weeks in June 2004, and although I now like other volumes better, this one still holds a special place in my heart.

The Doll’s House, Neil Gaiman

Ooh, this volume is spookier than I remember.  It’s a bit hard to explain the plot, which is intricately linked to other storylines, but in short, it’s about a girl called Rose, who is looking for her little brother.  A number of other people are milling around: G.K. Chesterton, a woman who’s been pregnant for several years, a serial killer with teeth in his eyes, women with enormous spider collections, and that makes it interesting.  Still, essentially it’s all about Rose.  She has multicolored hair and numerous connections to the previous volume.  She is also a vortex, which means that she can break down the walls between everybody’s dreams.  In case this does not sound alarming, Neil Gaiman makes it really, really disturbing.  Like, much more so than the serial killer convention.  (To me – but I’m very attached to my dreams.  I’d be interested to know what other people think.  How disturbing do you find that scene where all of her flatmates’ dreams start melting into each other?  Particularly with Barbie and Ken?)

When I first started writing this review, I was going to say that two of the issues included in this volume don’t really go well with the rest of the book, but then I realized that was nonsense.  They both go very very well, “Tales in the Sand” and “Men of Good Fortune”, because they give you a really vivid sense of Dream’s mercilessness and isolation, and how both of those things can play into what’s going to happen in the rest of this volume.  As well as what’s going to happen at the end of the series, which – hey – is pretty impressive.

Gilbert is such a wonderful part of The Doll’s House.  I love Gilbert.  I think it is so nice of Neil Gaiman to have given his fictional G.K. Chesterton the chance to really actually rescue a damsel in distress, which G.K. Chesterton seems to have greatly wanted to do.  G.K. Chesterton charms me.  I would say that G.K. Chesterton accounts for a higher percentage of the quotations in my commonplace book than any other author – funny how I don’t own a single thing he wrote.  But he’s delightful here.

Still not the best, but Neil Gaiman is clearly finding his voice.  The theme of storytelling that runs through the Sandman continues to be developed here.  Neil Gaiman is always good with that theme.  Hm, and so is Martine Leavitt.  Creating yourself by the story you have about yourself.  That’s a good theme.  When it is handled well in a book, I nearly always like that book.  Maybe always always.  I’ll have to think more about this.

Tom Finder, Martine Leavitt

I just bought a bunch of new books.

Tom Finder is the fifth from the bottom.  Two of the other books I got, I have not included in this picture, because I am going to get them for my oldest sister for Christmas, and although I’m pretty sure she doesn’t read this blog, I don’t want to take chances.

See, it turns out I was entitled to get this gift card from Amazon for $100, so I claimed it, and then I spent it.  I spent my money very sensibly, which allowed me to get free shipping and two of those books for free, and I ended up with a dozen of them.  A baker’s dozen.  I mean, fourteen – the dozen of an extremely generous baker.  I am exceptionally pleased with myself, and I am most excited about Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me, which I am putting off reading because I enjoy to delay gratification.

Anyway, I read Tom Finder first of the new-to-me books above pictured (only three are new), because I want to read the book to which Getting the Girl is the sequel, and it’s not yet in at the library, and because I thought I wasn’t going to like it that much.  I knew it was about a boy living on the streets, and I didn’t like Heck Superhero, which was similarly themed; whereas I loved The Doll-Mage and Keturah and Lord Death.  But indeed it was quite, quite, quite wonderful.

Tom finds himself on the street and can’t remember anything about his life before.  But he meets a man called Samuel who tells him that he is a Finder, and he must find Samuel’s son, Daniel Wolflegs, who has gone missing.  Samuel says that Tom has to find Daniel before he can find his own home.  Tom gets good at finding things – money, books, library cards, food – and he writes down all the things he can figure out about himself, so he won’t forget again.  He comes up with a theory that words are in charge of everything – because he writes things down and discovers they are true.  He writes down “Tom is nice”, and he always tries to be nice after that – because he remembers that he has written down that he is.

I really, really liked this.  I am about to write a geeky fangirl letter to Martine Leavitt and tell her how much I admire her.  Because honestly, her books are very very good.  Tom Finder was.  I feel guilty for reading it as a substitute for Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me.  I completely forgot about Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me while I was reading it, which is funny given how much I’ve been yearning to read Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me for the past, I don’t know, week and a half.  And I forgot all about the stabbing pain about which I am too much of a lady to say more.  And I was too absorbed to stop long enough to write down in my commonplace book the bits I wanted to write down in my commonplace book.  So props to Martine Leavitt.  Again.

(Did I already discover she was Mormon, and then forget I had discovered she was Mormon?  She’s Mormon.  Who knew?)

Edit to add: This afternoon I went grocery shopping with my mum, and we stopped at Bongs & Noodles just for fun, but mainly I believe so she could get Chalice, and I was looking at bargain books, and I got Eleanor Rigby and Special Topics in Calamity Physics, both in hardback, for just shy of twelve dollars.  It is a banner week for me and new books!  So while I watched the very exciting LSU football game, I covered all my new paperbacks in contact paper, and I put plastic dustjacket covers on my new hardbacks until I ran out of plastic covers (need to order more).

The Interloper, Antoine Wilson

Recommended by: an adventure in reading

When I say that this book reminded me of how much I love to read, I don’t want you to take that as too much of a compliment to the book. With that caveat – The Interloper really reminded me of how much I love to read. I went to the library today with a massive big list of books to get, and all the ones I wanted most, they hadn’t got (ain’t it always the way). But this was the one I was most interested to read so I sat down and read it; and when I had to get up and clean the kitchen, I did that thing where you do all the tasks you can do while reading, which takes ages because you are only using one hand and not very much of your brain, and then you have to actually put the book down so you do the other stuff lickety-split with maximum efficiency so you can quickly get back to reading your book.

I will sum up: The protagonist’s wife’s brother was murdered by this guy, Henry Joseph Raven, and the wife, Patty, has been very unhappy ever since then, and the protagonist (Owen – I hate the name Owen) decides to help his wife come to terms with it by getting a sneaky revenge on Raven. He invents this persona, Lily, and writes letters to Raven to make him fall in love with her, and the Plan is that when Raven is totally in love with Lily, Owen will crush him completely by revealing that Lily isn’t real. And instead of that he

SPOILER

finds out Raven’s been lying in all of his letters too and then he (Owen) gets all crazy and winds up killing Raven’s girlfriend in a fit of rage.

/SPOILER

The Interloper is very interesting, and in a way it’s not badly done. Mr. Wilson does a good Unreliable Narrator Guy, with the dropping of the hints and the filtering stuff through crazy eyes. I wanted to know what would happen.

As I typed that just now, I realized that I didn’t read the end of this book. Dude! I didn’t skip to the end! Huh. Turns out I was reading so absorbedly that I actually forgot to read the end. I don’t think that’s ever happened before. Obviously my brain has ceased to function. This is an object lesson in never ever ever getting so attached to cross-stitching and guitar-playing that you cut back drastically on your normal reading habits.

I know! I’m making it sound so good! But here’s the thing (the two things): This book, it was totally creepy. The blog where I read about this book compares it to Lolita, by comparison with which any book would suffer, but Lolita does creepy in way that doesn’t make my flesh crawl – which you’d think pedophilia would, if anything was going to – whereas The Interloper was kinda icky and unpleasant to read.

Plus, there’s this also, if you are not a person who is phased by creepy: The whole plot was just entirely unbelievable. Really. And you are getting this verdict from a girl who 1) is entirely conversant with Crazy as she has two therapist parents; and 2) has a deep knowledge of the power of talking the talk until you are walking the walk. One time, my driver’s ed teacher was awful and made me cry and I feared and hated driving and then I started saying “I love driving! Driving is my favorite thing in the world! Driving is amazing and wonderful!” until I really felt that way and now I love driving so, so, so much. (This is a victory story as far as I’m concerned, but I told it to my ex one time and he seemed very perturbed by it.) But in spite of my experiences with crazy and brainwashing, I still found this completely silly.

I don’t even know what categories to file this under. Hmph.