The Enchantress of Florence (final review)

I sort of forced myself to finish The Enchantress of Florence, partly because a new book by one of my favourite authors has just arrived in the post but also because I was just getting bored with this story. I wrote a quite glowing post about this book last Sunday in the Salon, at which point I’d only read most of part I, which I still think is pretty good, telling the story of an European story teller travelling to the Moghul Empire to tell an at first unlikely story to the Emperor about a forgotten Moghul princess, as the spoils of war, she was passed from war lord to war lord until she ended up enchanting Florence. The first part describes the Moghul city beautifully and you get a real sense of a story being told as we follow both the story teller and the beginning of the story he has to tell to. It was at times dryly funny and I read most of it with a smile literally on my face, not just from the humour but from the beauty Rushdie was creating with his words.

But Part II lost it for me a bit, concentrating more on Florence, it became sort of a story, within a story, within a story. It lost it’s humour and also the sense I wrote about last Sunday of sitting by a camp fire as I read the book, with someone actually telling me the story. What I’m trying to say is that I think the narrator of the story as a whole faded a bit in Part II.

It picked up a bit in Part III as it rushed towards the climax of the story, revealing more about the actual Enchantress and her fate and how this story from the Moghul emperor’s past still had the power to take over his present.

So overall not a bad story so to speak but it definitely lost it’s power as it continued.

A little bit more back to normal

A quiet day today, a run first thing, across the river, then up around the top of Bushy Park, then back down through the middle of it and then back home again, well almost, at 8.38km I had to stop at a traffic lights and after running that far, stopping is fatal, my legs turned to instant jelly and I could run no more. It was funny though when running through Bushy Park, I could see a crowd up ahead and as I ran closer suddenly the crowd started running en masse towards me, obviously the start of a race but I yelped and ran into the trees!

Girl Lacer has a birthday party this afternoon, I’ve just dropped her off where she surprised me on the way there though, I said the house we were going to was on X road and she goes “Oh that’s the road you can go down to Sainsbury’s”, how’d she know street names at only 4! Anyway luckily I didn’t have to stay as that 8+ k has pretty much wiped me out! Had another case of house envy though with the bits of the house I did see!