Enchantments

Last week I read The Enchantress of Florence, by Salman Rushdie (2008). It's a fantastical novel with a three-page bibliography. It's set 600 years ago or so, but doesn't qualify as a historical novel in my view, since it's the story of a story told by a liar, so it's got no reliable history in it. Still, Rushdie obviously took into account a lot of detail about Renaissance Florence in order to give the liar some detail to discuss, and similarly made sure to research Indian history in order to create a complex fantasy version of Akbar's kingdom. Anyhow, it was an easy read, almost a page-turner (unlike Midnight's Children which I liked a lot better but which I read much more slowly). It left me unsatisfied. I don't want to give away the ending at all, but for me there was something about the uncollapsed make-believe that left me feeling a little empty, unlike, say, Atonement or the movie The Usual Suspects, which bring you through a fantasy but close off, or complete, the fantasy, not leaving you feeling like the author got lost somewhere along the way. I might sound like I'm trying to stuff everyone into the same narrative framework, and maybe I am despite myself. There is something unsettling though, about a story that sets you up to be deceived and then in the end tells you you weren't being deceived at all, that this unbelievable mass of coincidences and self-serving (to the fictional story-teller) stories of the supernatural were in fact all ... maybe not true, but not worth exploring as stories. The way the story concludes is at odds with every clue and some explicit pieces that are given the reader along the way.