The Audience Throws Vegetables
Colin Burrow
- BuyThe Enchantress of Florence by Salman Rushdie
Cape, 356 pp, £16.99, April 2008, ISBN 978 0 224 06163 6
Even serious and persistent readers often say they can’t finish Salman Rushdie’s novels. His unfinishability has some obvious causes. Wearyingly encrusted description is the natural mode of the earlier fiction. In Midnight’s Children the central character’s dog dies, but dogs can’t just die in Rushdie: they have to be abandoned on the other side of town, they have to be cursed, they have to be superhumanly loyal, they have to run after their owner’s car for miles. Even then they can’t just keel over with exhaustion. They have to have their guts explode: ‘she burst an artery as she ran and died spouting blood from her mouth and her behind, under the gaze of a hungry cow.’ That is an exemplary Rushdie sentence, right down to the presence of the detached observer, the cow who is interested in the dog’s death for all the wrong reasons.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions