The Moor's Last Sigh
(Libby/OverDrive eBook, Kindle)

Rushdie's first novel since the fateful Satanic Verses (1989) is about hybridization of cultures, and itself seems a hybrid between William Faulkner's Yoknapatawpha County novels and The Thousand and One Nights. This four-generational family saga takes place in Rushdie's native southern India and witnesses the decline of a spice-trading dynasty, a century-long drama of "family rifts and premature deaths and thwarted loves and mad passions and weak chests and power and money and the even more morally dubious seductions and mysteries of art." The fanciful tale is related by the last of the exhausted family line, Moraes Zogoiby, son of a pair of Indians of far different backgrounds and persuasions, his father Jewish and a Mob leader in Bombay, his mother Catholic and celebrated for her artistry. The "Moor," as he is called, was born physically precocious; in fact, he ages at twice the normal rate. The plot does not unfold--it floods like a river gone over its banks, exploding with incredible events and larger-than-life characters, and to be carried along is to ride beautiful prose through the colliding and conjoining of races and religions that have gone into the making of the fabric of Indian history and culture. A marvelously wrought novel, guaranteed to entrance. (Reviewed November 1, 1995)0679420495Brad Hooper

Not since Midnight's Children has Rushdie produced such a dazzling novel. Nor has he curbed his urgent indignation or muffled his satiric tongue. In a spirited story related at a breakneck pace and crammed full of melodrama, slapstick, supple wordplay and literary allusions, Rushdie has again fashioned a biting parable of modern India. Telling his story ``with death at my heels,'' the eponymous narrator relates the saga of a family whose religious, political and cultural differences replicate the fault lines by which India is riven. The Moor tells of ``family rifts and premature deaths and thwarted loves and mad passions and weak chests and power and money and... the seductions and mysteries of art.'' He speculates on the duality of all things, the conflicting impulses of human nature and the clash between appearance and reality. Like the tale itself, the title has multiple layers of meaning. ``The Moor's Last Sigh'' refers to two paintings, one a masterpiece by the narrating Moor's mother, Aurora, the other a trashy work by her onetime protégé and lover, and later implacable enemy, Vasco Miranda, who becomes the Moor's nemesis. The Moor was thus nicknamed at birth, the youngest child of Aurora, the heiress to the da Gama spice-trade dynasty, and Abraham Zogoiby, a penniless Jew who was her family's employee. Aurora has become one of India's most famous artists, even as her shadowy husband has metamorphosed into a power broker in the Bombay underworld. The narrator was born with a deformed right hand and a disease that ages him two years for every year he lives: ``Life had dealt me a bad hand, and a freak of nature was obliging me to play it out too fast.'' The woman he adores is a pathological liar who fools the Moor into making a fatally wrong choice. Rushdie's own plight informs these pages, but it is always integrated into plot and character. Already an outcast from society, the half-Jewish Moor is expelled from his family; when he leaves India, he becomes increasingly disoriented and is eventually imprisoned, awaiting a death that may strike at any time. Of another character, the Moor says: ``Thirty years in hiding! What a torment....'' Rushdie gives his linguistic virtuosity full play: his prose, as always, is energetic, jaunty and lyrical; the dialogue is truly ``lingo-garbling'' as characters speak in such suffix-burdened neologisms as ``you tormentofy me,'' and ``payofy us back.'' A series of indelible portraits evokes the greedy da Gama clan, who personify many of India's self-destructive traits. All too aware of the apocalyptic events toward which he is hurtling, the Moor yearns to ``wipe my moral slate clean.'' Certainly Rushdie's moral rigor has not faltered. Where Midnight's Children heralded the birth pains of modern India, The Moor's Last Sigh charts a nation's troubled middle passage. The society Rushdie portrays so powerfully is rife with corruption; pluralism is dying and a dangerous separatism is on the rise, encouraging hatred and despair. 100,000 first printing; major ad/promo; Random House AudioBook. (Jan.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

In this widely publicized novel, the beloved but controversial author of The Satanic Verses (LJ 12/88) unfolds the saga of a multiethnic family. The primary setting is Bombay during the often socially and politically turbulent atmosphere of the 20th-century. The focus is on Moraes Zogoiby, the narrator, whose life is strongly influenced by both Eastern and Western traditions. As a preface to his own story, Zogoiby, known as "Moor," reveals the details of his ancestry. To the listener his family may appear to behave abnormally, but as the Moor himself states, "They have persuaded me that it is the idea of the norm that is bizarre, the notion that human beings live ordinary everyday lives." Art Malik is quite expressive in his reading, creating accents appropriate to the setting. This is an engrossing tale from a multicultural perspective and will make a suitable addition to all literary collections.‘Catherine Swenson, Norwich Univ. Lib., Northfield, Vt. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

This amazingly inventive fiction is--as all the world knows- -its Indian-born author's first adult novel since Iran's Ayatollah Khomeini put a price on Rushdie's head in 1990 for the ``offense'' against Islam perceived in The Satanic Verses (1989). And, by the time you read this, it will almost certainly have won Britain's 1995 Booker Prize. It's the story of a deliriously mixed and conflicted, helplessly self-destructive family, the da Gama-Zogoiby clan of Cochin in South India, and later Bombay, whose herculean appetites and Machiavellian dealings mockingly embody the history of 20th- century India. That story is told by Moraes (a.k.a. ``the Moor''), fourth child and only son of wealthy businessman and reputed crime boss Abraham Zogoiby (a Cochin Jew) and celebrated painter Aurora da Gama (a Portuguese Catholic), heiress to her family's spice fortune and a prominent figure in the Indian independence movement. ``Moor,'' a veritable Scheherazade, records the tangled history of his multiform family--including, among other bizarre persons and events, his great-grandfather's philosophical mysticism, his maternal grandfather's ``comic-opera efforts at importing the Soviet Revolution'' to Cochin, and his homosexual great-uncle's misadventures as a transvestite--during what seem his last days: for Moor was born afflicted, not just with a deformed right hand, but also with a unique condition causing him to age at twice the normal rate (i.e., at 36, he's physically a 72-year-old); furthermore, he's being held hostage by his mother's rejected lover, an inferior artist who means to obliterate the aesthetic gap between them. That's the real point of this Rabelaisian extravaganza: That distinctions--between Catholic and Jew, Muslim and Hindu, even human and animal--are what set us at one another's throats and threaten to undo us. For sheer headlong inexhaustible inventive force and fury, there's been nothing like this in English since Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow in 1973. It's Nobel Prize time.

Following a collection of short stories (East, West, LJ 11/15/94) and a fable (Haroun and the Sea of Stories, LJ 11/1/90), Rushdie has produced his first novel since The Satanic Verses (LJ 12/88); no word yet on the plot, however. Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information.

Moraes Zogoiby, the product of a mixed marriage, is a self-described "cathjew nut" living in the multicultural stewpot of Bombay. His freethinking mother, Aurora, heiress to a vast spice trade fortune and reputedly a descendant of Vasco da Gama, decorates his nursery with murals featuring American cartoon characters instead of the traditional Hindu deities. Young Moraes's cultural identity is so confused that his favorite Indian is Tonto, from The Lone Ranger. Aurora is also a renowned artist, and the book's title refers to her masterpiece, which has been stolen by a rival and smuggled out of the country. Moraes's frantic search for the painting is complicated by the fact that he ages at twice the normal speed and is quickly running out of time. This rich and very readable novel is filled with playful allusions to postwar Indian history, world literature, pop culture, and Rushdie's own recent travails. On a par with the marvelous Midnight's Children (LJ 2/15/81), this is Rushdie's best work in years. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 9/1/95]?Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information.

Not since Midnight's Children has Rushdie produced such a dazzling novel. Nor has he curbed his urgent indignation or muffled his satiric tongue. In a spirited story related at a breakneck pace and crammed full of melodrama, slapstick, supple wordplay and literary allusions, Rushdie has again fashioned a biting parable of modern India. Telling his story ``with death at my heels,'' the eponymous narrator relates the saga of a family whose religious, political and cultural differences replicate the fault lines by which India is riven. The Moor tells of ``family rifts and premature deaths and thwarted loves and mad passions and weak chests and power and money and... the seductions and mysteries of art.'' He speculates on the duality of all things, the conflicting impulses of human nature and the clash between appearance and reality. Like the tale itself, the title has multiple layers of meaning. ``The Moor's Last Sigh'' refers to two paintings, one a masterpiece by the narrating Moor's mother, Aurora, the other a trashy work by her onetime protege and lover, and later implacable enemy, Vasco Miranda, who becomes the Moor's nemesis. The Moor was thus nicknamed at birth, the youngest child of Aurora, the heiress to the da Gama spice-trade dynasty, and Abraham Zogoiby, a penniless Jew who was her family's employee. Aurora has become one of India's most famous artists, even as her shadowy husband has metamorphosed into a power broker in the Bombay underworld. The narrator was born with a deformed right hand and a disease that ages him two years for every year he lives: ``Life had dealt me a bad hand, and a freak of nature was obliging me to play it out too fast.'' The woman he adores is a pathological liar who fools the Moor into making a fatally wrong choice. Rushdie's own plight informs these pages, but it is always integrated into plot and character. Already an outcast from society, the half-Jewish Moor is expelled from his family; when he leaves India, he becomes increasingly disoriented and is eventually imprisoned, awaiting a death that may strike at any time. Of another character, the Moor says: ``Thirty years in hiding! What a torment....'' Rushdie gives his linguistic virtuosity full play: his prose, as always, is energetic, jaunty and lyrical; the dialogue is truly ``lingo-garbling'' as characters speak in such suffix-burdened neologisms as ``you tormentofy me,'' and ``payofy us back.'' A series of indelible portraits evokes the greedy da Gama clan, who personify many of India's self-destructive traits. All too aware of the apocalyptic events toward which he is hurtling, the Moor yearns to ``wipe my moral slate clean.'' Certainly Rushdie's moral rigor has not faltered. Where Midnight's Children heralded the birth pains of modern India, The Moor's Last Sigh charts a nation's troubled middle passage. The society Rushdie portrays so powerfully is rife with corruption; pluralism is dying and a dangerous separatism is on the rise, encouraging hatred and despair. 100,000 first printing; major ad/promo; Random House AudioBook. (Jan.) Copyright 1995 Cahners Business Information.

This saga of a family whose history is interwoven with that of modern India, Rushdie's first adult novel in seven years, won England's 1995 Whitbread award. (Jan.)