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.

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 Emergency to the proliferation of the Mumbai Underworld Mafia in the 1980s and the 1990s with a parallel Upperworld Political communal Mafia, Rushdie, the master puppeteer creates a show where the Zogoibys, as Kalliope rightly points out, are the puppets of Mother India, the various myths that Mother India is, the various false myths Mother India is, and also the children of that passionately loving, passionately cruel Mother that are entranced and entrapped, approaching their doom with double the speed they are supposed to travel, and all by their own terrified consent.

Like the Moor’s tale, my own take on the tale is anything but coherent, scattered like Moor’s loose pages all over the place, messy and chaotic. Allegorical to Mother India. Full of magical-realism, it is a realism that seems magical to the onlookers, a tragi-comedy, a tragedy to the characters, a farce to the readers, a drudge to the living. Written in 1995, this is Rushdie’s first novel after The Satanic Verses, that forced an author underground because he chose to speakofy his mind not in hush-hush barely-decipherable ambiguous impotent tones but in an in-your-face to-hell-with-you don’t-askofy-if-you-don’t-want-the-bleddy-truth profane potent portent loudspeaker style. It was not Moor who was exiled by his Mother Aurora da-Gama Zogoiby, but the Unlucky (Zogoiby in Arabic) Rushdie, the Indian bastard (or as Rushdie-Moor likes it, baas stink, turd no translation needed) of a non-Indian community who was disowned and thrown out by Mother India, hurtling towards an imminent death perhaps at double the speed of his biological life-span, cursed by another Mother-Rumpelstiltskin who wanted him all for herself.

The Moor’s tale, then, is not just an allegory to Modern Mother India, or to her unfortunate children, but also particularly to one special crippled child Rushdie himself, betrayed by his mother, his housekeeper Miss Jaya He (see the point? It is a phrase in the National Anthem, loosely meaning Victory/Hail! -to who-else-but-Mom-India?), by his only lover artist Uma Sarasvati (Two Indian Goddesses in one – Uma, the wife of Shiv-who-destroys Sarasvati, the incarnation of knowledge, therefore, the brilliant girl who destroyed Moor), and lastly, by his own Muse Vasco Miranda (an allusion to another profane blasphemous Indian artist M.F. Hussain, exiled by our Mom?) for whom Moor’s mother Aurora was once his own Muse.

Where to start? After all this long dithering, I haven’t startofied my review yet. When Moor’s own tale is all over the place, how do I know where to begin? When the tale itself is a pastiche, a random sticking of images and histories that has its own method to madness, when there is no clear beginning but only a vertigo where anything can come first, beware, O Readers, I too will stick-o-fy my point wherever I wish, like Moor stickofies one page of his tale to a tree and the other to a wall and a third to a well until they’re all over Benengeli, and don’t point-o-fy your fingers at me if you don’t like my jabberings lest I Jaw-Jaw at you like that now-stuffed dog.

Ah, but it all began with the spicy “spices” trade, didn’t it? The Portuguese had the hots for all our hot stuff and came here crossing half the world for a pinch of pepper. And then the Jews, the exiles from their own Mothers came sailing and sat down in Cochin, becoming the Cochin Jews, and also came all the Portuguese Christians, all of them with their hidden mysteries that led them here, and went into the
pepper trade. So here we come to the Portuguese Epifania and Francisco da Gama in the early 1900s with their children -Aires who married Carmen-Aunt Sahara, the flat barren desert who was never touched by her homo husband and so never reaped the fortune that lay between her legs, a legal heir, and Camoens, who married Belle who made both boobies and babies with her hubby to bring forth Mother Aurora who would marry a Cochin Jew who…. But, like Moor, I’m getting ahead of my tale.

While we witness the interesting, hilarious events of the da-Gama family as Belle wages war against the dominating matriarch epiphany Epifania, what we witness in the in-house separation (Belle, Camoens,
Francisco going anti-British-Simon-go-back, Epifania-Aires-Carmen going The-Brits-gave-us-what-all-we-have)is a microcosm of an India torn into two factions – an elite pro-British bunch, especially Christians/Portuguese afraid of giving up their pretty Anglican ways simultaneously rightly fearing Indians in charge of India, and an optimistic pro-Independence pro-equality, softly flirtatiously Marxist, heavily nationalistic euphoric duds bunch rallying under the suave charm of the English-pruned Nehru and the rustic-once-upon a-time-Angrezi-imitator-now-desi-by-choice little naked man Gandhi in-a-loin-cloth.

The ballistic warfare in the da-Gama family that ends with Belle taking charge of the house and the business when national chaos descends and Aires and Camoens are dumped into jail for 15 years signals the victory of the INC, the Nehru-led Congress party that would replace the British in 1947. But as everyone knows, Pandit Jawaharlal Nehru screwed up the nation that was put in his hands, that dilettante child of Macaulay who finally produced his dream Minuteman, Indians in blood and color, but English in choices and opinions, daydreaming of progress as the country burned and got beaten up in front of his closed sleeping dreaming eyes.

For all his failures, I now think, Rushdie has been really kind to him, only mocking him with semi-seriousness (Aires, out of contempt, names his bulldog Jawaharlal Jaw-Jaw to annoy the pro-Nehru family-members):

Shut up, Jaw-Jaw, you all-bark-no-bite-mutt…

Like Jaw-Jaw Jawaharlal, they made plenty of noise but didn’t draw much blood.

Panditji, Congress-tho is always chickening out in the face of radical acts. No soft options will be takeofied round here.

Once, indeed, there were giants on our stage; but at the fag-end of an age, Madam History must make do with what she can get. Jawaharlal, in these latter days, was just the name of a stuffed dog.(At this point in the story, the dog is dead and is stuffed by Aires to keep him “alive”, a brilliant metaphor by Rushdie.

While the World Wars rage and the Independence movement gains momentum, Aurora grows up mother-less, not so much as motherless, as her Mummy Belle hunts business deals during the day and tigers to feed upon at night, with Camoens tucked away in jail. And when Belle dies after Camoens is released, Aurora, the 13-year old kid unleashes her week-long mourning in isolation by maddeningly painting her room, pouring forth vivid confusing images of the family yarn and weaving them onto a carpet of colors. At 15, she chooses the quiet Arab-Jew clerk Abraham Zogoiby, as old as her father as her lover, and while her father dies, she moves in with him, because she cannot marry him. In the book, this is quite an interesting, roaring episode, a great commentary on religious/cultural clashes, of standing up to one’s family for one’s right to love, of the great complicated affair a family is within the even more complicated nuances of age-old cultural rivalries, building upon Romeo and Juliet but our lovers are no Romeo or Juliet – if they cannot marry, they will not. But they will love. Not in their sacred hearts, but in their scandalous bodies. Not from their respective captive homes, but in the freedom of their house.

Let them make their own yarn. But welcome back to India. It’s an independent country now. Aurora has taken V. Miranda the artist under her wing and at the dinner table, newly-found freedom is being celebrated while Hindus and Muslims massacre each other in Kashmir. Miranda lashes out at the self-deceived foolery around him:

’Useless fucking art-johnny clever-dicks,’ he jeered. ‘Circular sexualist India my foot. No. Bleddy tongue-twister came out wrong. Secular socialist. That’s it. Bleddy bunk. Panditji sold you that stuff like a cheap watch salesman and you all bought one and now you wonder why it doesn’t work. Bleddy Congress party full of bleddy fake Rolex Salesman. You think India’ll just roll over, all those bloodthirsty bloodsoaked gods’ll just roll over and die […]

[…]And I’ll tell you something, Mr. Big Businessman Abie, let me give you a tip. Only one power in this damn country is strong enough to stand up against those gods and it isn’t blanket blank sockular specialism. It isn’t blanket blank Pandit Nehru and his blanket blank protection-of-minorities Congress watch-wallahs. You know what it is? I’ll tell you what it is. Corruption. You get me? Bribery […]

[…]One more thing, piece of good advice for you all. Get on the boats with the British! Just get on the bleddy boats and buggeroff. This place has no use for you. It’ll beat you and eat you. Get out! Get out
while the getting’s good.

Why is Kashmir the point of contention between India and Pakistan, and not any other state, when there were and are so many other probable candidates too? It is because immediately after Independence when many states/kingdoms (Junagadh, Hyderabad, Kashmir...) wanted to be independent nations, Sardar Vallabhbhai Patel was appointed to unite them under India by hook or crook. Patel succeeded, but Nehru intervened. Instead of Sardar, Nehru wanted to be the one to convince Kashmir’s Hindu king, who ruled the state’s majority population of Muslims, to join India. Bleddy Reason: Nehru was a Kashmiri Pandit. He was so much in love with his state, the dudhead wanted the glory of salvaging his darling state and he messed it up with his ineptitude. And Hindus and Muslims, torn between India and Pakistan and the chance of becoming an independent entity, slaughtered each other, sending the nation into yet another bout of shock, paranoia, enmity and accusations. The riots haven’t yet ended – they have become more frequent, all over the country. And Vasco was right. Gods are useless. Money speaks. Bleddy money speaks and bleddy gods listen.

It was not an inebriated Miranda’s senseless tirade – it was a spectacular summing up of how India was doomed from the very start, and would pay heavily for the foundation it had achieved its Independence on. And the consequences, in Moor’s words, as we jump momentarily to the end of the novel which alludes to the turning points in India’s Communal history (the demolition of Babri Masjid in Ayodhya in December 1992 by BJP-RSS-VHP political right-wing Hindu party, and the subsequent terror attacks by Muslim extremists in Mumbai particularly and riots all over the twin countries) are:

Violence was violence, murder was murder, two wrongs did not make one right: these are truths of which I was fully cognizant. Also: by sinking to your adversary’s level you lose the high ground. In the days after the destruction of the Babri Masjid, ‘justly enraged Muslims’/‘fanatical killers’ smashed up Hindu temples, and killed Hindus, across India and Pakistan as well. There comes a point in the unfurling of communal violence in which it becomes irrelevant to ask, ‘Who started it?’ The lethal conjugations of death part company with any possibility of justification, let alone justice. They surge among us, left and right, Hindu and Muslim, knife and pistol, killing, burning, looting, and raising into the smoky air their clenched and bloody fists. Both their houses are damned by their deeds; both sides sacrifice the right to any shred of virtue; they are each other’s plagues.

But warnings were given even earlier, when Aurora wasn’t even born, by Camoens, referring to the hymn beloved to Gandhi, that says Ram/Ishwar and Allah are one, the Hindu and Islamic gods are but different names for one god, predicting the events of 1992 when the Mosque was partially demolished on the argument that Lord Ram was born there 5000 years ago, where the 400 years old mosque now stood:

And they say Ishwar and Allah is your name but they don’t mean it, they mean only Ram himself, king of the Raghu clan, purifier of sinners along with Sita. In the end I am afraid […] people like us will have to lock our doors and there will come a Battering Ram.’

But back to old India, to the two Mothers that captured the imagination of real India, while Aurora takes hold of Moor and Moor’s life, in the middle of the 20th century. From Cochin, the story swiftly moves to Bombay as the Zogoiby family relocates there and the nation transitions from political babysteps to an enfant terrible, a socio-political menace in the dexterous, able hands of Rushdie’s flawlessly executed introduction – Aurora’s rebellious high-parapet frenzy blasphemous scandalizing dance in contempt of Maharashtra’s beloved Hindu festival, Ganesh Chaturthi, the celebration of the Elephant-headed god first used as a pretext for banned large-scale meetings by the freedom-fighter Lokmanya Tilak who fanned the flames of armed resistance against British Raj, then recently appropriated by the notorious political hard-liner party Shiv Sena to drive out poor non-Marathi migrant workers from the state, turning an innocent festival into the hotbed of religious frenzy and fanaticism and filthy opportunistic politics, where the two make unlikely but highly-compatible bedfellows.

Rushdie takes a dig at Shiv Sena founder, the cartoonist-turned-militant Bal Thackeray, mocking his ugliness by adding a nickname “Mainduck” (Frog in Hindi) to his fictitious name Raman Fielding, blatantly accusing his party of all the dirty politics they have played, transitioning from champions of Marathi culture and people to moral policing (read: lathi-charging young couples, married or unmarried, for holding hands in public on Valentine’s Day and beating the hell out of them if they become a bit cozy on other days too) to aligning with BJP-RSS-VHP and inciting communal hatred.

And coming to Bombay, (ooops! Mumbai now, unless you want Shiv Sena pulping you for the indiscretion) how can we forget our silver screen Mother now, Mother India, the quintessential tale of the Indian mother, Indian bride, Indian wife, Indian woman (she doesn’t exist on her own, does she?), the quintessential tale of rural agricultural India, the quintessential tale of common man which the gripped the country’s imagination, with its spectacular pair of mother (played by Nargis) and rebellious son Birju (played by Sunil Dutt) who married soon in real life. The movie becomes a source of discussion for India, a metaphor for the imagined India that was so far removed from metropolitan India and yet survived through popular myth, through Metanarratives, as the essence of India. Juxtaposing the rural movie with the metro city, the fictional mother-son with real-life lovers, Aurora says, as Nargis and Sunil Dutt visit her home:

‘The first time I saw that picture’, she (Aurora) confided to the famous movie star (Nargis) on the high terrace at Elephanta, ‘I took one look at your Bad Son, Birju, and I thought, O boy, what a handsome guy – too much sizzle, too much chilli, bring water. He may be a thief and a bounder, but that is some A-class loverboy goods. And now look – you have gone and marry-o‘ed him! What sexy lives you movie people leadofy: to marry your own son, I swear, wowie.’

‘Even in the picture, but,’ Aurora went relentlessly on, ‘I knew right off that bad Birju had the hots for his gorgeous ma.’

And now, Rushdie’s own careful comment on the movie, which can be seen both in and out of context of the novel:

In Mother India, a piece of Hindu myth-making directed by a Muslim socialist, Mehboob Khan, the Indian peasant woman is idealized as bride, mother and producer of sons; as long-suffering, stoical, loving, redemptive, and conservatively wedded to the maintenance of the status-quo. But for Bad Birju, cast out from his mother’s love, she becomes, as one critic has mentioned, ‘that image of an aggressive, treacherous, annihilating mother who haunts the fantasy life of Indian males.’

And what about the other Mother India, the one that haunted real-life India? Indira Gandhi, daughter of Nehru, first female PM of India, the one who boldly broke the sanctions on India and went ahead to test India’s first nuclear device in Pokhran, and in 1975 she imposed the Emergency when it became clear that she would be removed from her post. Like Aurora, she is the heroine and the antiheroine, the mother and the anti-mother figure of India’s story. While the poor and the honest beg and die, or are executed, the rich and the corrupt oil each other and reap its dirty wealth. Abraham Zogoiby enters the Underworld negotiations and his business grows exponentially, while Aurora’s stars as the beloved Indian artist rise and sink and rise.

With Uma Sarasvati’s machinations that drive mother-and-son apart, Moor’s foray into Mainduck’s clan, his prodigal return to his father who then has no use for him and discards him for the second time, it is India we see, everywhere, everywhere. This isn’t a story about the Moor or the Zogoibys at all. It is Rushdie’s impeccable skills that make you think that it is about the characters caught up in a particularly eventful century.

Even though it is about India, the surface story never flags; the two are so closely intertwined together that they cannot be told without either going missing. Each one tells the other’s tale. And so, when the characters aren’t likeable enough, or deep enough, it is because they aren’t meant to be. Generalizations are never finely woven -like a summary, they have to span over a large slice of time and eschew much of finesse. And yet, the characters are deep enough, nuanced enough to keep the reader gripped in the surface story and not just let him/her slip into the metaphorical story of India.

And like the titular painting ‘The moor’s last sigh’, the final act of forgiveness that Aurora bestows upon her son Moor -India, and the Moor’s tale too is a palimpsest, a painting upon a painting, a
superimposition of one tale over the other. Two tales that have merged into one, even though they are different.

Why this deeper story masquerading so convincingly as the surface story, or vice-versa? Because, my dears, this is what India is. A visual deception, a deception nuanced, fine enough to send the unwary casual stroller on the wrong path. The Upperworld and the Underworld don’t just co-exist as allegories, they are the same story itself. They are not two sides of the same coin. It is not you-or-me, it is you-and-me. Their threads are so finely enmeshed that to destroy one is to destroy the other too. And so, readers, is Rushdie’s tale. The Zogoibys and India don’t just co-exist. The Zogoibys are not a metaphor for India, a microcosm, a summary of India, a representative of the land. It is not India simplified, India-for-Dummies guidebook. They and India are different, but part of the same story.

2nd part of the review - https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

Started out alright but Rushdie can’t seem to just sit still and be a good boy. No sooner have you got settled then he’s up and off on some mad caper with some outlandish characterisation, blurred reality and has you out on a boat in a stormy sea of symbolism laden.

And while you vomit over the side and try to catch a glimpse of the stability of land somewhere on the horizon, he relates a tale of Moraes, a child strangely deformed born into a wealthy family involved in the southern Indian spice trade.

As you push off from the shore into a calm sea, his tale of family rivalries in trade and love keep you highly entertained for a good third of the novel. As soon as the focus shifts to the narrator himself as the family moves to Mumbai, the billows start to roll and you quickly lose your bearings.

Rather than actually being written by him, it’s almost as if the novel has been infected with Rushdie at about this point and finds that it can’t recover. The narrative starts to make less and less sense, characters do ever more strange things, and one by one your ideas about what is worth taking note of are challenged for, it seems, no good reason.

For example, Moraes is a Benjamin Button-esque child who, you are told, ages at twice the rate he should. Initially I thought this was going to be used to set up some kind of conflict for him later on in life. But it seems Rushdie had this mad idea one morning and, by week three of his writing sessions, had forgotten all about it. I had no idea why he would do this.

At times, the writing is clever, but these episodes are so few and far between they aren’t enough to nourish you on your journey. You get very much to the point where you wish it was all over. Sadly, this doesn’t coincide with the actual end of the novel.

Compared to his classics, this novel was, for me, a major disappointment with no purpose that I could discern.

More reviews and the 1001 books spreadsheet at http://arukiyomi.com

Salmon Rushdie is one of those authors that I really try to like. Some of his books I do genuinely like. And, then, there are the books like this one. They ramble on and on and one . . . and don't seem to be going much of anywhere. They are multi-generational family tales, that bounce around in time, and I seem to be constantly lost as to who is who -- mostly because I'm too uninterested to pay much attention. I'm listening to it on audio, which is probably compounding the problems, but I'm three hours or so in -- with 15 or so to go! -- and the thought of another 15 hours is like anticipating some sort of Chinese water torture. Nope.

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 lacks the magical feel of the rest the book and feels overstretched. The same can be said for the endings of Midnight’s Children and Shame, the other two Rushdies that I’ve read. Is it me, or is Rushdie just not that good at bringing his otherwise brilliant stories to conclusion?

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.

So this is, I think, my third Rushdie book I've read. I think my favorite part of reading multiple books by the same guy is that you get a sense of what characters he likes and what gets set aside for another book. I found about three side characters in this book that made their way into Enchantress of Florence. It's funny that way. There's like a little Rushdie universe that gets deconstructed and remade in a new image every book, where the same personalities get recast and put into new relationships. It's fun to read, you can almost see it as an experiment where he sees who clashes with who, who falls in love, and who gets to be the hero.

In The Moor's Last Sigh, though there is no hero. I mean, sure, there's a protagonist, but Moraes Zogoiby is noone's hero. Least of all his own. He's hardly even the focus of the story. One would argue that the entire da Gama side of his family, three generations of women so strong and beautiful they could only exist in book form, are the heroes. Except for the family drama that intercepts their family business (spices!) and the proof that all of the da Gamas (and Zogoibys, and any other family mentioned) are all hideously morally corrupt. In many ways its a Follett novel in India.

And that is the other argument, I suppose. That this book isn't about family, its about India. There's lots of inside jokes...wordplay, codeswitching, and the like, which require some background on India to get. And for those that don't know India that much? There's wikipedia. I love the wordplay, though, it makes it fun and lighthearted to read, even when we're talking about the illegal labor market of Bombay. The lightheartedness of it even can serve to emphasize how awful some of these things are.

In my personal opinion, Moor's Last Sigh isn't as good as the other two I've read, Enchantress of Florence and Shalimar the Clown. Again, this is just me. Moor's Last Sigh was up for some pretty awesome awards, so I may very well be in the wrong here. But I just felt that it wasn't as tightly written or as detailed, because of the family issue and the fact that there are so many "main characters" to focus on. And as much as Rushdie focuses on and raphsodizes about Bombay, I never really had a Feeling of Bombay. It isn't an ode to the city, as much as it talks about how wonderful the city is. I've never been to Bombay. I have no more, or less, desire to go after reading this book. Bombay is almost a non-place in this book, like something out of BLDGBlog. Though I suppose that could be on purpose, because Moraes never truly "lived" in Bombay, or anywhere else for that matter. But for all of these huge questions and sketchinesses in the book, somehow, because he says so, everything falls in its right place.

I’m more than convinced that Rushdie is erudite, clever, even brilliant at times. Why, then, was this book such a chore to read?

For one, I detested the characters, each and every one, and felt nothing but relief at each of their grotesque demises. Perhaps it sounds trite to label Rushdie a misogynist, but how else to characterize a writer for whom mothers are cold and selfish, wives are unimaginative philanderers, girlfriends are crazy psychopaths, daughters are one-dimensional idiots to be killed off in as remorselessly predictable fashion possible? The men range from aging queens to aging fascists, with various forms of decrepit machismo short of these.

I don’t fault the plot for being improbable, but for being nonsensical and disconnected, and ultimately pointless. I couldn’t bring myself to care what happened to all of these ludicrous and disgusting monsters - hateful, self-absorbed, and oddly clueless - but why did it all have to take so long? Most likely due to Rushdie’s annoying penchant for list-making. Rather than paint a picture, he creates intolerably boring lists, a form of braggadocio-showmanship meant to showcase his exhaustive knowledge and sharp eye for detail. But from the reader’s perspective, those lists are merely exhausting. And, as I said, boring. Besides being unrelateable, the information he pummels us with, word by excruciating word, is simply not as interesting to us as it seems to be to him. Or maybe I’m wrong, maybe he doesn’t care either? Hard to tell. In any case, I sure don’t.

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 will stay with me forever.

As for the man with the dreadlocks....well, I met someone else and forgot all about him until about a year later when it occurred to me that I hadn't seen him on the bus for a while and he must have moved.

Dit boek vond ik leesbaarder dan de duivelsversen maar blijf een gevoel houden dat ik mis waar het uiteindelijk om gaat.

definitely a difficult and time consuming read that i would have otherwise given up on had it not been a necessary read for a class that i’m in. however upon finishing this novel i have found deep insights as well as a good story. in Rushdie-style there was an unconventional narrator, which i was a big fan of, in this case the story was told as a first person account looking back on his life, and that’s all i can tell you without spoiling the ending.

At times, it felt like Rushdie was trying hard to recreate the meta narrative magic of Midnight's Children. But nevertheless, the author remains a class one story teller who captivates the reader into the twisted dysfunctional world of the Zogoibys. Where every eccentric or abnormal character echoes a normality.