The Moor's Last Sigh

This book is a complete mess - with its flowery and chutneyfied English, Shakespeare references and vigorous blasphemy. Rushdie intersperses Indian history, from the mixed roots of Bombay to the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi, with commentary on art, life and the nature of fear. This is a book populated by Iberian-Cochin Jews, willowy men in wedding dresses, Moorish architecture, Spanish follies, failed romance and a prematurely white-haired beauty - I absolutely loved every page of it :)

I think it's broadly a reflection on the image of 'mother India' - the Nehruvian patriarchal foil for a sexist and discriminatory climate. The focus on the Jewish, Catholic and Protestant minorities, as well as the Muslim Moorish influence, seems to be a kind of way of rejecting an increasingly narrow view of Hindustan. It was that narrower, spiritualist view of Indian-ness that caused Jinnah to break with Gandhiji; a breach that - exacerbated or driven on by the Britishers - was continuing to cause so much strife. Salman Rushdie's rich histories offer another interpretation, closer to India's profound diversity.

But the main plot line, focussing on the accelerated traffic in time of the narrator, who ages double-quick, seems clouded by Rushdie's half-life, living under the threat emanating from Khomeini's Valentine's Day death rattle.

I read this, as I do, while walking the dogs in the morning and afternoon, but when I sat down with it in the holidays for a serious reading session, I thought, what the hell am I wasting my time on this crap for. It's all hyperbole and no depth. No surprise when I looked up his birth chart and saw he is a double Gemini. Like a stone skipping over the water Rushdie describes his characters and tells his story skipping from one thing to the next. Everything and everyone is the most beautiful, the ugliest, the wickedest, kindest, most gullible, largest, etc etc etc. It's like a comic book set in India, without the pictures. I know there is a world of people who love this sort of frippery but it ain't for me.

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.

A week ago I went to see Salman Rushdie talk about his memoirs. In preparation I decided to read something by him, and picked The Moor’s Last Sigh from my shelf. The book had been there for quite some time, being picked up only to be put back again. Somehow I just did not seem to have the energy for Rushdie’s writing. The truth is that this state of mind still applied when I committed to reading the book, but this time my mind was firm, so I read it from beginning to end.

There is much to admire in The Moor’s last sigh. Rushdie has an amazing talent for writing and the language is beautifully crafted. But sometimes this barrage of words feels like too much. The sentences are long, and unless you concentrate you easily get lost. Here is an example of a beautiful passage:

"How to forgive the world for its beauty, which merely disguises its ugliness; for its gentleness, which merely cloaks its cruelty; for its illusion of continuity, seamlessly, as the night follows the day, so to speak- whereas in reality life is a series of brutal raptures, falling upon your defenseless hands, like the blows of a woodman’s axe?” (The Moor’s Last Sigh – Salman Rushdie)

It is a lovely passage, but even when reading these lines, you have to pay a lot of attention to punctuation in order to avoid re-reading the lines a few times. The problem is that the entirety of this densely lined book is filled with intricately wrought sentences like the above. This is fine if you are in the mood for a careful read, but in my tired Autumn mood I was not up to the challenge.

In addition to the language, the story itself is also worthy of admiration. The story spans several generations, with one tale more incredible than the other. But there are so many characters and so many stories that somehow I ended up not able to root for any of the characters. And this was not because of their questionable deeds. I enjoy reading about characters who blur the lines between good and evil and cherish books that can give me insight into why ordinary people end up doing bad things. In this book there were simply too many and no real explanation for their deeds. When the main character finally came into the picture I had already had my fill of bizarre stories. I did feel some empathy towards his predicament, growing old twice as fast as other people, but not enough to really care about what happened to him.

So although there is much to value in this book, for me it remained an objective admiration for a fine work of art. Only on rare moments did the book manage to captivate me or move me in any significant way. The next book I read is bound to be something completely different.

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.

Its been a mono colour monotonous monologue so far. Rushdie seems to start again from where he ended last rather than advancing further. Seems he is obsessed with a typical narrative and can't come out of it. Having read Midnight's Children this book reeks heavily of it and in a decadent way.I've read halfway through so far, hope there's something more to the plot than repetitive, loud cirumlocution.

‘I turned seventy on New Year’s Day 1992, at the age of thirty-five.’

Moraes ‘Moor’ Zogoiby has a condition that accelerates his growth. If that is not enough he also has a large club like deformed hand. The story is based on his narration of his life story and that of his family generations.

My first Rushdie. My wife said start with this one. Brilliant, powerful, sprawling. Incredible language and characters. Reminded me of Dickens in some of the grotesque character descriptions.

Left with a feeling of having read something really special. And of course the image of a stuffed dog being wheeled around.

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.