Moor's Last Sigh Hb [Hardcover]

Salman Rushdie (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 7, 1995

'Moor' Zogoiby, only son of a wealthy, artistic Bombay family, finds himself at crisis point. After a tragic love affair, he plunges into a life of depravity in Bombay before leaving for involvement in financial scandal in London and, ultimately, violence in Spain. From the author of MIDNIGHT'S CHILDREN.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com 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 gravestone 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, and Rushdie has the tools to pull it off. He earned a 1995 Whitbread Prize for his efforts. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Publishers Weekly

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.
Copyright 1995 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 400 pages
• Publisher: Jonathan Cape; 1ST edition (September 7, 1995)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0224038141
• ISBN-13: 978-0676510409
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.1 x 1.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (84 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,900,458 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Sir Salman Rushdie is the author of many novels including Grimus, Midnight's Children, Shame, The Satanic Verses, The Moor's Last Sigh, The Ground Beneath Her Feet, Fury, Shalimar the Clown and The Enchantress of Florence. He has also published works of non-fiction including, The Jaguar Smile, Imaginary Homelands, The Wizard of Oz and, as co-editor, The Vintage Book of Short Stories.

He has received many awards for his writing including the European Union's Aristeion Prize for Literature. He is a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and Commandeur des Arts et des Lettres. In 1993 Midnight's Children was judged to be the 'Booker of Bookers', the best novel to have won the Booker Prize in its first 25 years. In June 2007 he received a knighthood in the Queen's Birthday Honours.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

37 of 38 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Cynical Examination of Betrayal and Thwarted Dreams, July 15, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: The Moor's Last Sigh (Paperback)

In a careful and calculated manner, The Moor's Last Sigh leaps across four generations of a rich and demented Indian family, weaving an exquisitely-crafted tapestry of murder and suicide, atheism and asceticism, affection and adultery.

The first person narrator of this cynical yet mischievous book is Moraes Zogoiby, aka "Moor," who, seemingly unaffected by his asthma, spins his tale sitting atop a tombstone within sight of the Alhambra in Spain and pursued by a policeman named--like the holy city of Islam--Medina.

The centerpiece of this captivating and gorgeous novel is Moor's highly dysfunctional family, a Grand Guignol of good and evil, the deformations of the spirit wrought by love withered or love withheld and the beauty and violence of art, all representative of the tortured history of twentieth century India.

Moor, himself, is the champion of miscegenation and cultural melange, bastards and cross-breeds. Standing six and one-half feet tall, Moor has a withered right hand and, like India, he grows too fast, twice the rate of a normal human being. A thirty-six year old elderly man, still in love with a deceitful (and deceased) woman, Moor exhibits the body of a none-too-healthy seventy-two year old. His bloodline, too, is as crowded and diverse as India, herself.

Moor is the son of Abraham Zogoiby, a South Indian Jew who is probably the illegitimate descendant of Boabdil, the last Muslim Sultan of Granada and the celebrated artist, Aurora da Gama, a Christian claiming descent from the Portuguese navigator Vasco da Gama.

Abraham and Aurora's love first carries them to the dizzying, hyperbolic heights of fame and power, then plunges them into depths reminiscent of Lucifer's expulsion from Paradise. The blood of the Zogoiby family is indeed tainted--with murder, adultery and lies--and they, in turn, infect everyone they encounter.

A tragic figure, Moor nevertheless reveals a wickedly comic streak, as Rushdie combines high art with gaudy jags that refer to the pop cultures of India, America and Britain. Although most Rushdie readers are well-versed in multi-cultural sociology, even the most erudite may have to struggle with this book's obscure, inside jokes and satire.

Disorientation also can occur as Rushdie leaps across time zones, from present to recent past to near future to ancient history. These time shifts, however, play an integral role in explaining each of Moor's vignettes and relating their importance to the story as a whole.

Among the many dualities threading their way through The Moor's Last Sigh, is the one of good art versus bad. The book's title actually refers to two paintings entitled, The Moor's Last Sigh. One is painted by Aurora, the other by her one-time-admirer-turned-nemesis, Vasco Miranda. Aurora's work is a masterpiece, the last in a series of allegorical paintings in which her son serves as subject. It becomes the symbol that finally gives Moor the humanity he so desires. Miranda's, on the other hand, is a sentimental kitsch of Sultan Boabdil's final departure from Granada. Which one best typifies Moor? In a sense, both do.

The narrative, as can be expected from a Rushdie novel, is filmy but faultless: a magical mixture of fact and fable, fantasy and absurdity, comedy and tragedy. Despite its brilliant touches of comedy, the tone remains dark, solemn and sober. Peopled with a wide range of characters, even when parodic and allegorical, they retain their essential humanness.

In the end, Rushdie really does paint Moor as a prophet, though one whose messianic calling looks not to the arrival of God but of the better self in all of us, the reconciliation of our mongrel ethics and spirituality.

A timely and compelling novel full of contradictions and complexities, The Moor's Last Sigh begs the reader to look beyond its impeccably composed plot to the discordant richness that typifies postcolonial India today.

25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars An Indian Dante, December 22, 2005

By 

Roger Brunyate "reader/writer/musician" (Baltimore, MD) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: The Moor's Last Sigh (Paperback)

The prologue to this brilliant book opens "in this dark wood . . . in what ought to be the middle pathway of my life." The reference to Dante is but one of a number of literary allusions crammed into almost every densely-textured page, but it turns out to provide a key to the curious structure of this ambitious work, which is basically a violent family saga with the even more violent birth-pangs of modern India as its background.

Rather than starting in the Inferno, the book quickly rises to a sort of Paradise, and holds the reader there, enthralled, for the first two-thirds its length. Rushdie's fictional Gama-Zogoiby family mingles ancient bloodlines--Portugese, Moorish, Jewish, Hindu--and they come together in a sort of nuclear fusion. He writes in language at once false and true, brighter than Technicolor, spiced with pepper and coriander, erotic, witty, wildly inventive, and rich with more references than this reader can count.

In its last third, however, the book somewhat loses its élan. First, it plunges its eponymous hero into the Bombay underworld as a kind of living Hell. Then, in the deceptively simple writing of its final section, it uproots him from India and wafts him to a surreal vision of an Andalusian village overrun by expatriates, to end in a stateless Purgatory. It is an unusual journey for this modern Dante, but (as others have commented) it may reflect the author's own life since his exile. One feels his grief for India, his lost Eden.

Rushdie's title, besides being a multilingual pun (dernier soupir / last supper), is the name of a painting by the hero's mother, a famous artist. If the book has any one overarching theme, I would say it is about art itself: its passion, its power to simultaneously define and distort experience, and (sadly) its ultimate impermanence.

[As a footnote, it is curious that THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH joins two other novels I have read recently in having a protagonist whose life-clock runs in an unorthodox manner. The hero of Andrew Sean Greer's THE CONFESSIONS OF MAX TIVOLI lives his life backwards. The hero of Audrey Niffenegger's THE TIME TRAVELER'S WIFE skips around freely in time. And Rushdie's Moor, Moraes Zogoiby, ages two years for every one. Although this is the finest of the three books, I am not sure what purpose is served by the distortion of time, except that it parallels the headlong rush of Rushdie's writing, and perhaps his own tragic sense of leaving life behind faster than he can catch it up.]

26 of 29 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars As good as always, February 27, 2001

By 

Emilia Palaveeva "ema-in-seattle" (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Moor's Last Sigh (Paperback)

After the Midnight Children, I was a little reluctant to buy another Rushie book, fearing I will be disappointed. However, The Moor's Last Sigh is as magical as the first one I read. Rushdie once again takes the point of view of an extraordinary individual, from an extraordinary family to look at the world, India and the small circle of the narrator's family and freinds. This unusual perspective, however, instead of alianating the reader, brings him/her closer and provdes us with a clearer understanding of the grand, as well as the ordinary.

A powerful mixture of tragedy and comedy.