Salman Rushdie Discusses The Enchantress of Florence
Sir Salman Rushdie, who just won
the "Best of the Booker" Award, talks
with James Mustich about his new book, The Enchantress of Florence.
I had the original idea for it I think as long ago as 1999, when I first wrote out to myself a kind of note, which I often do with ideas that I think might go somewhere. It can sometimes be a paragraph and sometimes ten pages. In this case, I think the note was about a dozen pages, sketching out why I thought it was an interesting idea -- as a reminder, because I was writing another book at the time. The strange thing is that almost all the actual plot that I wrote down originally I subsequently ditched. [LAUGHS] But the thing at the heart of it -- finding a fictional device that would allow me to bring together the Florence of the Medici and the India of the Mughals (two worlds which in real history have very little contact with each other in this period) -- that I have held onto from back then.
You know, I am an historian by training: that was my university subject [at Cambridge].
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As a result, I knew enough history to know that these were uniquely great moments in both India and Europe -- they were pinnacle moments of both cultures. So I thought it would be interesting to push them together and see what happened. That's the bit that I kept in my head.
Sir Salman discusses the work in depth and how important it was for him that the book be fun and an adventure. Set in the time of the Mughal empire, The Enchantress of Florence is really a romance -- the story of a woman who wants to make her own way in a man's world.
