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 Publishers Weekly
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. Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
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.-?Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los AngelesCopyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review
. . . a brave and dazzling fable. . . . No retort to tyranny could be more eloquent. . . .


From AudioFile
Rushdie's first novel since having been forced into hiding harks back in style and content to his Booker Prize-winning MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN. Like its predecessor, THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH reflects the cultural mix of Rushdie's native India. It is a pan-geographical, pan-generational taleÐa "collection of tales" all swirling aboutÐultimately intersecting upon the life of main character Moraes Zogoiby. Art Malik ably keeps the sprawling action comprehensible. But for his steady reading and clear Indian-English accents, the novel may well have been lost to listeners. Careful abridgment also helps in this regard. S.J.L. (c)AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
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. Brad Hooper


Review
"The most complete and gratifying work to emerge from Salman Rushdie's imagination...The Moor's Last Sign is an exotic story, in its setting, in its characters, in its punning extravagance, and in its deeply human core. It is an extraordinary family saga...full of wonderful characters, and the insight born of genuine reflection...A remarkable spell of creativity." --Edmonton Journal

"A rich, wonderfully readable novel." --Toronto Star

"One of the most wonderful works of political art I have encountered, a novel to rival Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, or Dante's Divine Comedy...The Moor's Last Sigh is one of the most admirable novels I've ever read." --Ottawa Citizen





Review
"The most complete and gratifying work to emerge from Salman Rushdie's imagination...The Moor's Last Sign is an exotic story, in its setting, in its characters, in its punning extravagance, and in its deeply human core. It is an extraordinary family saga...full of wonderful characters, and the insight born of genuine reflection...A remarkable spell of creativity." --Edmonton Journal

"A rich, wonderfully readable novel." --Toronto Star

"One of the most wonderful works of political art I have encountered, a novel to rival Turgenev's Fathers and Sons, or Dante's Divine Comedy...The Moor's Last Sigh is one of the most admirable novels I've ever read." --Ottawa Citizen





Book Description
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


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

FROM OUR EDITORS

His first novel in seven years, Rushdie creates a masterpiece of controlled storytelling. The Moor evokes his family's often grotesque but compulsively moving fortunes and the lost world of possibilities embodied by India in this century.

ANNOTATION

In his first novel since The Satanic Verses, Rushdie gives readers a masterpiece of controlled storytelling, informed by astonishing scope and ambition, by turns compassionate, wicked, poignant, and funny. From the paradise of Aurora's legendary salon to his omnipotent father's sky-garden atop a towering glass high-rise, the Moor's story evokes his family's often grotesque but compulsively moving fortunes in a world of possibilities embodied by India in this century.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

The Moor evokes his family's often grotesque but compulsively moving fortunes and the lost world of possibilities embodied by India in this century. His is a tale of premature deaths and family rifts, of thwarted loves and mad passions, of secrecy and greed, of power and money, and of the even more morally dubious seductions and mysteries of art.

FROM THE CRITICS

Susan Shapiro

"I was raised neither a Catholic nor a Jew. I was both and nothing: a jewholic-anonymous, a cathjew nut, a stewpot, a mongrel cur. I was -- what's the word these days? atomized. Yessir: a real Bombay mix." So says Moraes Zogioby, known as Moor, the narrator of The Moor's Last Sigh. Salman Rushdie's first novel in seven years is his best work since 1980's brilliant Midnight's Children. Moor, who has a disorder that causes him to age at twice the normal speed, is the last surviving member of a crazy clan of wealthy South Indian spice merchants. He tells their insane, incestuous, violent domestic saga, which spans four generations. It centers on his beautiful mother, Aurora da Gama, a stubborn, passionate, Christian artist who, at 15, falls in love with the handsome Abraham Zogioby, a penniless, 35-year-old Jewish employee of her family. They marry and have four children: Ina, Minnie, Mynah and Moor. Betrayal, murder, and mayhem ensue.

Rushdie, the author of nine previous books -- including The Satanic Verses, which prompted Ayatollah Khomeini to issue his death sentence in 1989 -- alludes often to his own exile, the story of modern India and the dangers of art. At first the hyperbole, didactic asides, verbal puns, lyrical and lewd jokes, and slapstick routines seem a bit much, but if you stick with it, a cumulative magic takes hold. Rushdie's satiric, hysterically funny, political family tragedy is a masterpiece. -- Salon

Publishers Weekly

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.)

Library Journal

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.

Norman Rush