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The Moor's Last Sigh

Salman Rushdie

3.93 · Rating details · 12,619 ratings · 656 reviews

Alternate cover for this ISBN can be found here

Moraes 'Moor' Zogoiby is a 'high-born crossbreed', the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinise spice merchants and crime lords. He is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a labyrinthine tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of ...more

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Paperback, UK, 434 pages

Published July 4th 1996 by Vintage (first published 1995)

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Rating details

· 12,619 ratings · 656 reviews

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Jan 12, 2015 Ilse rated it really liked it

Shelves: india, uk, reviewed

If love is not all, then it is nothing: this principle, and its opposite (I mean, infidelity), collide down all the years of my breathless tale.

And breath-taking it was, this epic saga on the rise, thriving and fall of four generations of an eccentric, wealthy Indian family - at least, such is the imprint the novel left on me, having read it about twenty years ago.

Deception, hatred, revenge and murder are the ingredients of an exhilarating story ultimately revolving around love: scorching ...more

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Aug 24, 2010 Kalliope rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: india, fiction-english, asia

This is another hard book to rate and review. Rushdie is a smart, ingenious and purposeful writer. Everything is cleverly thought out and his use of language is magical. He bends the words with ease and brings out richer meanings. The plot is an original story that unfolds as a series of riddles to a satirical account of modern India.

Yet, in spite of all that, the book did not click with me.

The characters remain puppets. As exotic cartoons they act out a sort of fable that sometimes appears wit ...more

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Jun 24, 2014 Lisa rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 1001-books-to-read-before-you-die, salman-rushdie

This is a catastrophe!

I didn't add a review when I finished reading The Moor's Last Sigh, thus depriving myself of the only relatively secure method of remembering a Salman Rushdie novel in detail. Well, maybe not detail, but at least in broad strokes.

As it is now, my empty brain will have to reread instead of just quickly checking what I hoped would be a gushing review matching the stars.

The Reader's Last Sigh! To be reread, a quixotic quest for lost memory of reading pleasure past. ...more

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Oct 11, 2013 Giedre rated it really liked it

Shelves: indian, liked-but-couldn-t-love, magic-realism, british, 20th-century, booker-shortlist, 1990s, historical-fiction

I admit that I had already given The Moor‘s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie a couple of unsuccessful tries before I finally challenged myself to reading it in one go a couple of weeks ago. It seemed just the right time to plunge into something by Rushdie after I unexpectedly met him at a conference he was giving in Madrid as part of the World Book Day celebration.

And yes, it was a big challenge. If one can love and hate a book at the same time, admire and despise it, crave for more and wish to fini I admit that I had already given The Moor‘s Last Sigh by Salman Rushdie a couple of unsuccessful tries before I finally challenged myself to reading it in one go a couple of weeks ago. It seemed just the right time to plunge into something by Rushdie after I unexpectedly met him at a conference he was giving in Madrid as part of the World Book Day celebration.

And yes, it was a big challenge. If one can love and hate a book at the same time, admire and despise it, crave for more and wish to finish it immediately, then I experienced it as well while turning the pages of The Moor‘s Last Sigh. I couldn‘t but admire Rushdie‘s genius, his boundless imagination and his capacity to interweave the lives of the characters of the book and the historical facts into one single fabric full of new colors. And at the same time I hated the slowness of the plot, which became even slower mixed with my incapacity to read Rusdhie‘s ornate language faster.

I loved how the author‘s experienced hand mixed classes, religions, ethnic groups, politics, business, crime and art. And I pitied my lack of knowledge of the historical and political context, which made me miss a lot of allusions and connotations that would have made more sense for somebody living in India.

I was tired of long sentences. And I relished the poetry of the language.

I chose to quote one single sentence, which resumes everything I tried to say in this review, and everything I was not able to express:

“And if the flies buzzed in through the opened netting-windows, and the naughty gusts through the parted panes of leaded glass, then opening of the shutters let in everything else: the dust and the tumult of boats in Cochin harbour, the horns of freighters and tugboat chugs, the fishermen’s dirty jokes and the throb of their jellyfish stings, the sunlight as sharp as a knife, the heat that could choke you like a damp cloth pulled tightly around your head, the calls of floating hawkers, the wafting sadness of the unmarried Jews across the water in Mattancherri, the menace of emerald smugglers, the machinations of business rivals, the growing nervousness of the British colony in Fort Cochin, the cash demands of the staff and of the plantation workers in the Spice Mountains, the tales of Communist troublemaking and Congresswallah politics, the names Gandhi and Nehru, the rumours of famine in the east and hunger strikes in the north, the songs and drum-beats of the oral storytellers, and the heavy rolling sound (as they broke against Cabral Island’s rickety jetty) of the incoming tides of history.”

Give it a try. Or a few. You’ll love it or you’ll hate it. Or both.

Oh, and if you are not sure what a palimpsest is, this book will teach you everything you need to know about it, I promise. ...more

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Aug 10, 2014 Agnes rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Review part 1 - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

So don’t let Rushdie fool you into thinking that “it is Moor/Zogoiby’s story and heck!, they’re somewhat flat, or Rushdie makes an allegory and fails on both counts – both the upperstory and understory are not
well-developed – happens when you want to ride two horses at once.” But, oh, dear, it is one horse, not two.

*sigh* this review just doesn’t end. But Rushdie is a crazy fellow, maker of an atom bomb – large scale destruction squeezed ...more

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Aug 07, 2014 Agnes rated it it was amazing

The Moor’s Last Sigh is a colorful, hard-hitting excursion into India. Squeezed into a paperback, it spans nearly a century, and through the tumultuous history of the Zogoibys as they enlarge their pepper trade in Cochin (wasn’t it with spices, the ‘hot’ pepper that it all started?) to a national scale diversification of all kinds of ‘spices’ of life, cruising through the intense political scenes of Independence movement to newly-acquired freedom to communal bloodshed to Indira Gandhi-led Emerge ...more

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Oct 17, 2015 Lit Bug rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

1st part of the review - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

So don’t let Rushdie fool you into thinking that “it is Moor/Zogoiby’s story and heck!, they’re somewhat flat, or Rushdie makes an allegory and fails on both counts – both the upperstory and understory are not
well-developed – happens when you want to ride two horses at once.” But, oh, dear, it is one horse, not two.

*sigh* this review just doesn’t end. But Rushdie is a crazy fellow, maker of an atom bomb – large scale destruction ...more

flag 16 likes · Like · see review

Jan 12, 2018 Andy Jacobs rated it it was amazing

Gripping and whimsical story spanning a century of one Indian family's business, artistic, and leisure endeavors. Rushdie's writing is like candy, with sweet turns-of-phrase and quirky Dickensian characters, leaving the reader craving the next page. With Garcia Marquez-ish elements of magical realism and a pervading sinister feeling, like Dumas. ...more

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Jul 09, 2008 Russ rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: fiction, 20thcentury

The Moor's Last Sigh is Rushdie's best book since Midnight's Children and is superior to The Ground Beneath Her Feet. Rushdie puts his spin on the multi-generational family novel. Like most such novels, it takes awhile to get the characters and families straight, but once you have the whole picture, you can begin to enjoy the magic that Rushdie is weaving through this genre. His first-person narrator ranges from funny to absurd to cruel, and Rushdie's playfulness with language is in full force h ...more

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Mar 02, 2013 Lit Bug rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

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Oct 04, 2009 Orionisisgray rated it it was ok

I almost stopped reading this a number of times, but I have a thing about finishing books. Salman Rushdie is one wordy motherfucker, the opposite of what I tend to enjoy. He's all for the word play, the linguistic jokes, the rhyming slang and colorful Indian colloquialisms, which are cute for a while but wear thin. His narrative is baroque, dripping with dramatic asides and rhetorical questions to the reader, teasing hooks, and a number of other devices I don't enjoy.

Still, I am interested in I ...more

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Dec 10, 2018 Zoeb rated it it was amazing

I was 7 years old when I was told that Bombay was now renamed as Mumbai. I remember being confused, at that tender, impressionable age, about what should I call the beloved city where I was born. Would it be Mumbai or would it be Bombay? I still prefer using the latter name but today, after having discovered and read about how the city had changed in all these years, I find myself wondering this: was it just the name that was changed?

It was Salman Rushdie's 'The Moor's Last Sigh' which answered I was 7 years old when I was told that Bombay was now renamed as Mumbai. I remember being confused, at that tender, impressionable age, about what should I call the beloved city where I was born. Would it be Mumbai or would it be Bombay? I still prefer using the latter name but today, after having discovered and read about how the city had changed in all these years, I find myself wondering this: was it just the name that was changed?

It was Salman Rushdie's 'The Moor's Last Sigh' which answered that question for me and indeed, the truth was difficult to digest. The Bombay of this evocative, frequently beautiful and brilliantly written novel witnesses glory in the past, in the freewheeling exuberance of the 1950s and 1960s, populated by snobbish filmstars, belligerent artists, shrewd crime overlords and happily corrupt policemen, a city of vice and opportunity, of both high art and ghetto aesthetic, of both elitist social gatherings on Sundays at the Mahalaxmi Racecourse and elaborate Ganesh Chaturthi processions, both of which still happen today in my city. Rushdie's uncanny awareness of Bombay's sights, sounds, sensations and smells is that spot-on even today.

We see the initially steady rise of this city paralleled with the onslaught of regional sectarianism and a cut-throat capitalist attitude, two forces that together diminished the easy-going and all-inclusive outlook of Bombay. We see all this through the eyes of its warped protagonist Moraes Zogoiby, the book's titular Moor, the Boabdil of the narrative who sighs wistfully when he witnesses the fortress of his own city besieged by forces that would bring it down.

Politically, like 'Shame', this is one of Rushdie's most astute and resonant novels. He wrote it in the 1990s, just the decade when India embraced the culture and technology of the West to a relentless degree and also the regrettable communal political agenda that divided the masses on lines of religion and historical legacy. This was the time when the mere question of the Babri Masjid built on the birth site of Lord Ram exploded into a blood-splattered travesty across the breadth of the nation and even led, more disastrously, to the bitter and calculated vengeance that left my city ablaze and brought down to its knees.

With ingenious, intuitive skills, the author devises extraordinary allusions and metaphors, which are as sharp as sublime; the fortress of Granada, which the Moor has to surrender and vacate, becomes the Bombay that Moraes has to leave in the end, when he is condemmned as an outcaste to this country and his own family. Before that, however, we are tugged on a whirlwind narrative that shuttles from the by-lanes of Cochin sweltering in the sun and the pungent fragrance of spices to the glitzy Bombay populated by cameos from Sunil and Nargis Dutt and even cricketing legend Abbas Ali Baig, from the gritty, seedier side of the city with its fist-fighting gangsters, textile mill strikes and its rabble-rousing cartoonist-turned-politician to the unexpected climax in Andalusia where the book becomes, unexpectedly, a dark revenge drama. It is not just a thrilling, giddy overload of information, pop culture reference and intensity; it is also painfully romantic and sensuous in the true Bombay fashion, from afternoon tuition that turns into a ritual of sexual discovery to the fervour of erotic couplings in the waiting rooms of the city's many train stations.

And above all, it is a devastating tragedy. More than his other novels, which have a vivid sense of celebration even in their darkest moments, this is Rushdie's saddest work yet. Its broken heart is located in its author's favourite theme of a state of exile and displacement from one's home.

In the middle of the narrative, the author doffs his hat at one of the greatest short stories ever written
and in the midst of that story, which was about the crippling consequence of Partition, he locates its own real point of emotional conflict as well - that of predicament of not being here or there but in a perennial state of no-man's land. 'The Moor's Last Sigh' is also about that predicament and like the gibberish that the character of that story speaks in anguish, it is the Moor's sigh that feels like the wistful sigh of pain and regret.
...more

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Apr 30, 2017 Inderjit Sanghera rated it it was amazing

Amongst the pantheon of great Indian writers- Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, R.K Narayan, Vikram Seth and Rohinton Mistry, none of them explore the fantastical nature of Indian society like Rushdie-whereas the Indian narrative form is often too deeply-rooted in Anglo-Saxon realism, Rushdie’s imagination is far more febrile and free-wheeling, like Marquez, Rushdie’s stories focus on social and political commentary via the form of magical realism and no other Indian author’s novels are populated with Amongst the pantheon of great Indian writers- Arundhati Roy, Kiran Desai, R.K Narayan, Vikram Seth and Rohinton Mistry, none of them explore the fantastical nature of Indian society like Rushdie-whereas the Indian narrative form is often too deeply-rooted in Anglo-Saxon realism, Rushdie’s imagination is far more febrile and free-wheeling, like Marquez, Rushdie’s stories focus on social and political commentary via the form of magical realism and no other Indian author’s novels are populated with as an eccentric (though not necessarily well-rounded) case of characters as Rushdie-perhaps the word ‘character’ is incorrect, rather Rushdie’s characters serve as caricatures by which he is able to explore the social dynamics of Indian society.

The story follows Moraes ‘Moor’ Zogoiby, scion of a wealthy Indian Jewish-Christian family; deformed and club-handed and left tumescent by story-telling, Moor’s metabolic rate causes him to age twice faster than normal and so the narrative races through the history of Moor’s family-from his great-grandparents the de Gamas, to his father, Abraham, a shadowy character with tenuous links to the Mumbai underworld and his mother, Aurora, a painter of macabre, Goya-esque paintings and whose belligerence and indifference to motherhood upend typical Indian conventions on motherhood. In fact most of the novel counteracts conventions on Indian women; the two avant-garde Indian artists, Aurora and Uma, are both female and the novel is dominated by matriarchal characters-however their form of matriarchy is domineering and selfish as much as it is protective or maternal-Abraham’s mother, Flory, forces him to sell his male heir to her in exchange for cash and the vindictive witch-like spectre of Epefania Menezes hovers over the early pages of the novel. Even the peripheral characters-from Moor’s gay great-uncle Aires, to the insouciant beauty queen Nadia Wadia, defy conventions and indeed as with many other Rushdie novels, the subject of post-colonialism and religious extremism are the dominant themes within the novel. In this case Hindu fundamentalism is castigated via the character of Raman Fielding, an erstwhile cartoonist transformed into a Hindu nationalist, Rushdie explores the seeds of the nationalistic fervour which is increasingly dominating Indian society, in the early stages of the independence movement and the affect their dogmatic and parochial views have on the minorities they persecuted-in this case the Jewish, Christian and Islamic communities of southern India.

‘The Moor’s Last Sigh’is probably Rushdie’s most well-rounded and profound book and one of the greatest works of modern Indian literature. ...more

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Jan 17, 2008 Robert rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: Everyone

This is my favorite of Rushdie's. It combines the lyrical mysticism of Midnight's Children with the hard-nosed magical-realism of the "present-day" sections of The Satanic Verses. I found Midnight's Children to have an almost apocolyptic feeling about it, especially in the later chapters -- this is hardly a knock against it. But I feel like The Moor's Last Sigh, while it certainly comes to a climactic head much as Midnight's Children, does so in a way that you feel is, I suppose, more thematical ...more

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Jan 10, 2014 Adina rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 1001, india

The novel was an anomaly for me. 5* for a book that I abandoned when I reached the middle and resumed reading after more than a year. It was probably the only book that I've abandoned and continued after some time. So glad I did it. Magical realism at its best. ...more

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Sep 02, 2016 Michael Finocchiaro rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: indian-20th-c, fiction, historical-fiction, post-modern, indian-subcontinent, man-booker-fiction

This was a beautiful book about the end of Arab rule of Spain and has made me dream for years (unfulfilled as of yet :( to visit Alhambra in Andalusia. Full of melancholy and some eye-opening facts, it is one of Rushdie's finest efforts and a worthy read after Midnight's Children. ...more

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Feb 27, 2018 Kam Thirteen rated it really liked it

It's a long and rough read. As far as magic realism goes, it's not quite Midnight's Children - more just interesting, rather than compelling. Would still recommend giving it a try, but with checked expectations. 3,8/5 ...more

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Aug 27, 2012 Ashley Sperling rated it liked it

I found this book really hard to get into for a few reasons. I would read some and then put it down for a few days, then try to resume and be entirely confused about who was who because there are so many characters and relationships introduced at the beginning, it's very hard to keep track. Also, Rushdie's wordiness made it much harder to get into the storytelling. At first the story seemed confusing and meandering until I got all the characters and relationships figured out. The last half seeme ...more

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Apr 26, 2013 Jelena rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: contemporary, bigass-real-shelf

“The Moor’s Last Sigh” has about everything you would expect from one of Rushdie’s novels. The story of several generations of a dysfunctional Bombay family, their eccentricities and decadence, is full raw emotion and set into the colourful development of India’s history.

With its carnival of temper, madness, prophecy, allusions and several detours like the one set in Alhambra or the world of pictures, this novel is still rather linear for the author’s terms. But even so some threads simply get ...more

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Apr 21, 2008 Pewterbreath rated it liked it

Honestly, I remember almost nothing about this book---something about a man who ages at twice the age that normal people are supposed to, something about his mother (who I found to be the most interesting character in the book--actually the women in this book leave the most enduring memories)--a spice plantation and fights about money.

This began my love affair with magic realism--which has since somehow curdled. At the time, I thought this is IT, this is what writing should be---but since then ...more

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Jul 02, 2018 D rated it really liked it

Shelves: english

A rich epic tale describing the rise and fall, and recovery, and meteoric rise again until its annihilation, of a business dynasty in colonial India, up to the end of the 1980's. The family claims to count Vasco Da Gama among its ancestors and generates or attracts plenty of interesting and eccentric characters with each generation, whose lives sometimes intertwine with historical figures and movements such as the Ghandi's, Nehru, the painter Amrita Sher-Gil, Hindu fanaticism, corruption etc.

Th ...more

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Jan 23, 2021 David (דוד) rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: drama, historical-fiction, location-bombay, prose, jewish-characters, satire, owned-read, salman-rushdie, fiction, indian-writers

4.5 stars

The Moor's Last Sigh is an amazing book! (and most probably, but not yet, I would count Rushdie as an 'insane' writer, in a good way of course). But it is most certainly not for everyone.
Personally, when I read some 1-star reviews, I realized I was loving the book precisely for the reasons that some people could not go on with it.

I loved the book for :
1) its amazing prose and wordplay. This is by far the biggest reason why I kept enjoying the book. And it pretty much never ends. Use of 4.5 stars

The Moor's Last Sigh is an amazing book! (and most probably, but not yet, I would count Rushdie as an 'insane' writer, in a good way of course). But it is most certainly not for everyone.
Personally, when I read some 1-star reviews, I realized I was loving the book precisely for the reasons that some people could not go on with it.

I loved the book for :
1) its amazing prose and wordplay. This is by far the biggest reason why I kept enjoying the book. And it pretty much never ends. Use of colloquial language, and word-play using local terms made it much more interesting. Much of the book being set in Cochin and (mostly) Mumbai (where my own origins are), I was enjoying a lot of this language-play, with puns and such. 5-stars to this part :)

2) setting being Mumbai, personally made it very interesting for me, having come across a few things about the city, the lives of the kind of people described, and the satire used for real notorious people of Mumbai from that era.

3) the book being a family saga of a dysfunctional family made it very interesting for me, because of the weird nature of the characters and their doings through four generations. I have never been much a reader of the family-sagas, but them being all weird, along with the earlier two reasons, made me enjoy the book. (I am a sucker for any ideas of weirdness, deviancy, abnormalcy, etc)

The book will be enjoyed much more by people who have lived in Bombay, or at least know a little bit of the happenings in that city from the 1960s through the 90s. Also, some knowledge of the history of pre-independent India would be helpful to relate. Furthermore, readers who know the local lingo and the language are bound to get more pleasure out of the book, especially the puns.

It is quite a smooth read that way, but not exactly so. The prose can be tough at times. I used to read not more than 20-30 pages a day. That was enough to derive pleasure for that current span of time. Haha!

I would give credit to one reviewer, who has said of the book to be 'Rushdie on never-ending LSD', and I totally would agree with it, which is something I loved. It is a wildly funny book in its own way. :)

Recommended. ...more

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Sep 27, 2013 Sidharth Vardhan rated it really liked it

Shelves: 5-indian, booker, list-1001, historical, magical-realism

In ‘Moor’s Last Sigh’, Salman Rushdie has captured the spirit of Mumbai city; the way he has done it before with India in ‘Midnight’s children’. There is everything in there which you come to associate with Mumbai - Bollywood, cricket, art, politics, gang war etc.

There are a lot of similarities with Midnight children. Both Saleem Sinai and Moor, for example, have joint families, find themselves attached in multiple ways to history. Midnight’s children though is on more grand scale and is definit In ‘Moor’s Last Sigh’, Salman Rushdie has captured the spirit of Mumbai city; the way he has done it before with India in ‘Midnight’s children’. There is everything in there which you come to associate with Mumbai - Bollywood, cricket, art, politics, gang war etc.

There are a lot of similarities with Midnight children. Both Saleem Sinai and Moor, for example, have joint families, find themselves attached in multiple ways to history. Midnight’s children though is on more grand scale and is definitely more recognized. In fact, Saleem Sinai’s adopted son also has a minor role to play in ‘Moor’s last Sigh’.

Moor’s last sigh is sorrow he felt which he, who by the way aged twice as fast as a normal person and has a hammer head, felt as he had to leave everything behind. For more than first half, women dominate the scene and among them too, it is mostly Aurora who rules the book. For first one-third part, Moor is not even born.

Moor is at same time somewhat humanized version of Mumbai and an allegory on life of Boabdil, the last moor. Boabdil was also known as Zogobi - the unlucky one; which became protagonist's surname. His looking back in regret after leaving Mumbai perfectly justifies the title. Baodil's mother on seeing him weep had said to him, "Thou dost weep like a woman for what thou couldst not defend as a man." The same remark which Merenda made when Moor refuse to make a useless effort to protect his fellow prisoner, who was introduced in last few pages just to complete the allegory.

Moor's father is a business man who started from spice trade (inherited from Cochin) and then diversified; and his mother is artist – thus showing two faces of city. Mumbai also started as a trade hub (mostly spice trade in the beginning) and is home to artists from all over the country.

Yet again, Rushdi spins the fact and fiction into a magical cobweb. The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Kissing of Abbas Ali Beg are actual paintings based on actual events. There was actually a medical student from Mumbai, who won Ms. Universe contest in 1967 (though similarity ends there).‘Raman Fielding’ (RAMan fielding) is Rushdi’s take on Bal Thackeray (– thus the book was not much liked by later). Both started as cartoonists; went onto become Hindu extremist heads; tried to rewrite the history and both play regional politics.

The book is full of typical Rushdie Masala including references to children’s books, Bollywood histories; family feuds; magical realism and word plays (my favorite being the thing he does with Aurora’s children - Inni, Minni, Mini, Moor.)
...more

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Mar 08, 2012 Texbritreader rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: literary-fiction, novel, indian

Rushdie offers a richly detailed family saga, full of passion and genius as well as secrets, lies and betrayals. Told by the multidimensional Moor of the title, Moraes Zogoiby, the tale begins with his grandparents generation and ends with the Moor's own demise. But between those two points Rushdie, in impeccable form, creates a fantastical exploration of Indian history, presents complex arguments about and descriptions of art, and questions the place and meaning of various religious affiliation ...more

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Feb 09, 2009 Leah rated it it was amazing

“Even when people are telling their own life stories, they are invariably improving on the facts, rewriting their tales, or just plain making them up… the truth of such stories lies in what they reveal about the protagonists’ hearts, rather than their deeds.” (135)

“There is nothing to be said of a Fact except that it is so. – For may one negotiate with a Fact, sir? – In no wise! – May one stretch it, shrink it, condemn it, beg its pardon? No; or, it would be folly indeed to seek to do so. – How ...more

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Oct 10, 2009 JL rated it really liked it

That I could taste the smells of a land I'd never been to. That if I ever had a child, I would name it Aerish. That I could fall in love with the way this man took you on a little turn. I read this book every morning after I returned from coaching...a top the little village of Sha Tin in New Territories of Hong Kong...always with my Marks and Spencer from a box cappuccino. It was the first book I read there and I remember it so well because I got to actually enjoy it. I didn't have to run off to ...more

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Jun 15, 2011 Yllacaspia rated it it was amazing

I read this book flirtatiously. Which is to say that I used to always see the same gorgeous man on the bus. He had blond dreadlocks and wore a suit, which is one of my favourite looks. He always had a book with him, as did I, and I would catch him looking at my book and he would catch me looking at his book. And one day I decided to make him laugh by taking the same book he was reading: which is how I ended up reading The Moor's Sigh. And I got totally wrapped up in this beautiful story which wi ...more

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May 04, 2019 Jules van der Sneppen rated it really liked it

Another wondrous work by Salman Rushdie. The Moor’s Last Sigh is a gripping family saga playing out against the historical backdrop of post-independence India, and heavily infused with that typical Rushdie-masala. Rushdie’s writing feels magical, and the storyline draws you in from its very first pages.

The book’s weak point is its climax, preventing it from bagging in a perfect score. The storyline’s last 5% is significantly less interesting and engaging than the 95% that preceded it. The ending ...more

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Jan 05, 2013 Monthly Book Group rated it really liked it

The final chapters of the book, and the opening chapter, to which they loop back, are packed (or “palimpsested”) with historical allusions. Moraes is not only Muhammad XI (Abu-Abd-Allah, or Boabdil, in the Spanish corruption of his name): he sees himself as Dante in “an infernal maze” of tourists, drifting yuppie zombies, and also as Martin Luther, looking for doors on which to nail the pages of his life story, as well as Jesus on the Mount of Olives, waiting for his persecutors to arrive. It is The final chapters of the book, and the opening chapter, to which they loop back, are packed (or “palimpsested”) with historical allusions. Moraes is not only Muhammad XI (Abu-Abd-Allah, or Boabdil, in the Spanish corruption of his name): he sees himself as Dante in “an infernal maze” of tourists, drifting yuppie zombies, and also as Martin Luther, looking for doors on which to nail the pages of his life story, as well as Jesus on the Mount of Olives, waiting for his persecutors to arrive. It is hard to avoid the impression that all the left-over analogues of the Moor fable from Rushdie’s notebooks have been poured into these chapters, which are as a result frantic and overwritten while elementary rules of fiction, like not introducing new characters in the last pages, are ignored.

Rushdie pursues palimpsesting with considerable vigour in The Moor’s Last Sigh, as a novelistic, historiographical, and autobiographical device. Thus Granada, Boabdil’s lost capital, is also Bombay, “inexhaustible Bombay of excess,” the sighed-for home of Moraes as well as of the author over whose person he is written. Both are cities from which a regenerative cross-fertilization of cultures might have taken place, but for ethnic and religious intolerance.

Like Midnight’s Children (1981), Shame (1983), and The Satanic Verses (1989), The Moor’s Last Sigh is a novel with large ambitions composed on a large scale. In its architecture, however, the Group found it disappointing. Aside from the dynastic prelude set in Cochin, and the last fifty pages set in Spain, the body of the book belongs to Moraes’s life in Bombay. But instead of the interwoven development of character, theme, and action characteristic of the middle section of what might be called the classic novel, the middle section of Rushdie’s novel makes only fitful and episodic progress. New actors are introduced with enough inventiveness and wealth of detail to justify major roles; yet all too often their contribution to the action turns out to be slight, and they slipped (or were slipped) out of the picture almost whimsically. It was also argued by some in the Group that those without a good knowledge of the history of the period both in Bombay and wider India would struggle with the narrative.

To complaints of this kind—which have been voiced with regard to the earlier books as well—defenders of Rushdie have responded by arguing that he works, and should therefore be read, within two narrative traditions: of the Western novel (with its subgenre, the anti-novel à la Tristram Shandy), and of Eastern story-cycles like the Panchatantra, with their chainlike linking of self-contained, shorter narratives. To such critics, Rushdie is a multicultural writer not merely in the weak sense of having roots in more than one culture but in the strong sense of using one literary tradition to renew another.

It is not easy to counter this defence in its general form, particularly from the position of an outsider to India. But to take a single instance from The Moor’s Last Sigh: the episode in which Moraes’s father, Abraham Zogoiby, in a fit of enthusiasm for the modern, impersonal, “management” style in business, adopts a young go-getter named Adam over Moraes as his son and heir. For some fifteen pages Adam occupies centre stage. Then he is dropped from the book. Most of the Group found the episode unsatisfying; further, we would hazard a guess that the reason why Adam disappears is not that Rushdie is following traditional Indian models but that he is only half-heartedly committed to satirizing the business-school ethos; he abandons this particular narrative strand because it is leading nowhere.

Others disagreed, enjoying the stories of Adam and other personages who blazed briefly across the pages of The Moor’s Last Sigh and then expired….

This is an extract from a review at http://monthlybookgroup.wordpress.com/. Our reviews are also to be found at http://monthlybookgroup.blogspot.com/

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Nov 09, 2013 Rags rated it it was amazing

Shelves: 5-star

I am writing this review almost a month after reading it .I also lost the notes , made during the course of reading but will try to do justice to it.

Premise

The story is recounting of family history by Moraes Zogoiby affectionately called 'Moor' while in exile. Only son of Abraham Zogoiby and Aurora Da Gama , heiress to the vast and affluent spice trade business. Moor suffers from a peculiar condition because of which he ages twice the normal growth rate. The family saga is an exquisite tale of ...more

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About Salman Rushdie

Salman Rushdie

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Sir Ahmed Salman Rushdie is a novelist and essayist. Much of his early fiction is set at least partly on the Indian subcontinent. His style is often classified as magical realism, while a dominant theme of his work is the story of the many connections, disruptions and migrations between the Eastern and Western world.

His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses, led to protests from Muslims in several coun ...more