The Moor's Last Sigh - Softcover

Rushdie, Salman.

3.93

13,988 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0394281977 ISBN 13: 9780394281971

Publisher: Pantheon, 1996

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Excerpts from Wilkpedia: The Moor's Last Sigh is the fifth novel by Salman Rushdie, published in 1995. Set in the Indian cities of Bombay and Cochin, it is the first major work that Rushdie produced after the The Satanic Verses affair, and thus is referential to that circumstance in many ways, especially the isolation of the narrator, as well as the shadow of death that seems constantly to hang over him. It is written in the same style as Midnight's Children, and raises issues of individuality and the possibility of hybridity in a world moving toward singularity. The Moor's Last Sigh traces four generations of the narrator's family and the ultimate effects upon the narrator. The narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, traces his family's beginnings down through time to his own lifetime. Moraes, who is called "Moor" throughout the book, is an exceptional character, whose physical body ages twice as fast as a normal person's does and also has a deformed hand. The book also focusses heavily on the Moor's relationships with the women in his life, including his mother Aurora, who is a famous national artist; his first female tutor; and his first love, a charismatic, demented sculptress named Uma..

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Review:

In The Moor's Last Sigh Salman Rushdie revisits some of the same ground he covered in his greatest novel, Midnight's Children. This book is narrated by Moraes Zogoiby, aka Moor, who speaks to us from a grave in Spain. Like Moor, Rushdie knows about a life spent in banishment from normal society--Rushdie because of the death sentence that followed The Satanic Verses, Moor because he ages at twice the rate of normal humans. Yet Moor's story of travail is bigger than Rushdie's; it encompasses a grand struggle between good and evil while Moor himself stands as allegory for Rushdie's home country of India. Filled with wordplay and ripe with humor, it is an epic work.

From the Inside Flap:

Time Magazine's Best Book of the Year

Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India and flavors the mixture with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.

"Fierce, phantasmagorical...a huge, sprawling, exuberant novel."--New York Times

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