Michiko golpea a Salman
6.04.2008
Salman Rushdie tiene éxito con las mujeres, salvo con Michiko Kakutani. La feroz crítica del NYT le ha dado con palo al nuevo libro de Salman, The Enchantress of Florence, al que calfica como un Magic Kingdom sin magia. Dice la Michiko:
Salman Rushdie’s new novel, “The Enchantress of Florence,” reads less like a novel by the author of such magical works as “Midnight’s Children” and “The Moor’s Last Sigh” than a weary, predictable parody of something by John Barth. The fecund language and exuberant inventiveness that have distinguished Mr. Rushdie’s best novels have given way here to more conventional, even academic constructions. And the capacious political analogies embedded in those earlier novels (in which a character’s or family’s fate became a metaphor for, say, the course of Indian history) have been replaced by musty philosophical musings about the craft of storytelling and the relationship between life and art. There are familiar Scheherazade-esque stories within stories within stories, and interminable Tristram Shandy-esque digressions that circle around and around and around. Certainly Mr. Rushdie has tackled the subject of fictionmaking before, most notably in his fanciful fairy tale “Haroun and the Sea of Stories” (1990). But “Haroun” — which pitted a young hero and his friends against an evil sorcerer who wants to reduce the world to silence and poison the wellsprings of art — was not just a postmodernist fable; it was also a parable about the plight Mr. Rushdie found himself in at the time, having had a fatwa issued against him by the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini for his controversial novel “The Satanic Verses.” And even as “Haroun” reworked motifs from classics like “Gulliver’s Travels,” “The Wizard of Oz” and “Star Wars,” it also enshrined its author’s own playful imagination and love of narrative invention. “The Enchantress of Florence,” in contrast, feels static and enervated, as though it had been mechanically assembled from a recipe that included lots of research (about Medici Florence and the Mughal empire), a rote sprinkling of fantasy, and some perfunctory and strained allusions to some greater politico- religious issues (like the Sunni-Shiite split and Islam’s troubled role on the world stage). Although the novel gains narrative momentum in its final chapters, large portions of the book consist of tiresome free-associative digressions and asides, heaped one on top of another in such profusion that they threaten to topple the slender frame story around which the book is constructed.
Al final de la reseña, Michiko vuelve a la carga comparando a Rushdie con el que más le duele, es decir con Gabriel García Márquez, la piedrecita en el zapato de Salman que debe estar harto de que lo comparen con el colombiano, siempre para peor. Dice la reseña:
Such talk about sorcery and mysterious doubles isn’t delivered here with the sort of dazzling sleight of hand that have made Mr. Rushdie’s most powerful work, like the most powerful work of Gabriel García Márquez, so mesmerizing and so phantasmagorical. Rather it’s lacquered onto a plywood story with a heavy paintbrush that leaves lots of streaks and spots and results in a work that feels jerry-built, meretricious — and yes, quite devoid of magic.
Etiquetas: eeuu, inglaterra, RESEÑA, rushdie, salman rushdie, the enchantress...
