I am writing this review almost a month after reading it .I also lost the notes , made during the course of reading but will try to do justice to it.

Premise

The story is recounting of family history by Moraes Zogoiby affectionately called 'Moor' while in exile. Only son of Abraham Zogoiby and Aurora Da Gama , heiress to the vast and affluent spice trade business. Moor suffers from a peculiar condition because of which he ages twice the normal growth rate. The family saga is an exquisite tale of love,jealousy,hatred,bickering over the family fortunes, compassion and healing . The story follows the change in family fortunes from rich to filthy rich and the moral degradation of the family and it's fall from grace.

Writing ,characters and backdrop

This is my first rushdie and I am blown away. Tight paced narrative, flourish of beautiful language. This is the kind of writing which will dissuade or inspire an aspiring writer to pursue his dream of writing. His writing is delightful, refreshing and enchanting. The clever use of cuss words , Indianism adds a wonderful dimension to the whole book. The story focuses mainly during a tumultuous time in Indian history. Mainly the last 15 years before Independence and 20 years post independence.Rushdie is not kind to the British who ruled India and committed unspeakably atrocities and neither on Indian politicians. Rushdie slyly uses language to deceptively shield sharp,scathing and downright damning criticism of Indian politicians. Rushdie is "in your face" audacious writer who made damning statement about Nehru and co. Though most of it is true and I personally think Nehru becoming Prime Minister of independent India was the the biggest self inflicted curse. Much of the problems plaguing India can be traced back to nehru or indira gandhi and the subsequent generation of politicians. I think it was in a way good that Rushdie was away from India during this time being in hiding because of the fatwa. If he was in India I can imagine all hell would have broken loose. Okay after rambling on about Indian history so long let's move on.

The character's created by Rushdie are all in some ways complex and flawed. They are all shades of gray. When one gets comfortable with the character and see them in positive light they surprise you with a cunning, mean and wicked streak. Aurora Da Gama falls in this criteria perfectly. A innocent child who loses her mother in early age but then commits a de facto murder. She taunts her children; abhors and despises her close friend . At the same time she in time's of need becomes a loving mother,caring,compassionate and kind lady.She tore the family apart but held it together too. All the character's are interesting, complex, baffling and add a lovely little zing to the storyline.

Fox in lamb skin ?

Though I like most part of the book , heck quite frankly I don't think there are any boring or loose ends. The tempo of the book also doesn't falter anywhere. BUT and this is a big but I do have certain negatives about Rushdie in the book. He describes 'Mr.India' the film as a third rate trashy affair and a rip off of star wars, with the actress clad in a wet sari as the only redeeming factor. I quite don't agree with him on this point. Agreed it was not a very insightful movie but the masses liked it and it was a huge hit. The movie was a huge hit at grassroot level. Maybe Rushdie likes art cinema but he has overstepped in criticism of the masses who liked it.
Which begs me to ask the question
'Is he any better than the snobbish Brtish and Indian politicians, whom he criticized ? '

'Is he perhaps just like the elite who look down upon the masses ?'

But I don't hold this against him.

5 star rating holds.

“I found I could remember very little about the journey. Tied down in the dark, I had evidently lost all sense of direction and of the passage of time. What was this place? Who were these people? Were they truly police officers? Was I really accused of drug trafficking and now also under the suspicion of murder? Or had I slipped accidentally from one page, one book of life, to another? In my wretched disoriented state had my reading finger perhaps slipped from my own story onto this other outlandish incomprehensible text that had been lying, by chance, just beneath? Yes. Some such slippage had plainly occurred.”

Multi-generational family saga set in India and Spain that follows a family of Cochin spice traders, the Zogoiby-Da Gama family, from around 1900 to the 1990s. The Moor of the title is Moraes Zogoiby. The Moor’s Last Sigh is also the title of a painting that plays a key role in the narrative. It is densely written in Rushdie’s usual manic style. He is an amazing wordsmith. The storylines are never straight-forward. Rushdie regularly loops back and forth (and all around), taking detours that are interesting and occasionally puzzling. The storyline contains a mix of India’s history, the separation of India and Pakistan, and folklore mixed with magical realism. I always enjoy Rushdie’s writing style. It is erudite, clever, and multi-layered. It is not always the easiest read, but well worth the effort.

It's a palimpsest--multiple layers, some showing through, others not. A bit of the story appears at a time, but never the entire thing at once. It is like life in that way. The themes are huge, and many. The characters are not fleshed out to the exclusion of any other, even the redoubtable Aurora, who is one of the wackiest characters in fiction, in my opinion. The writing is great, rythmic, pulsing, varied, challenging. I had to read this with a dictionary in hand. This added to my enjoyment of the book, but might be irritating to some. Rushdie is a genious. This was my first time reading one of his books, and it was a satisfying, tasty place to start.

I thought in the end the story dealt with life and death, love and loss, art as a means and medium to mitigate loss/suffering, or find/express oneself in relation to all life's highs and lows.

The novel also works as a metaphor for the larger geopolitical crises we live with in our age. I found many images which Rushdie carries forward into subsequent novels, (particularly the clown, the terrorist, the unrepentent criminal)and realized this novel is only part of the conversation Rushdie is having with his audience.

I found myself appreciating the author much more than I was prepared for. He gave me lots to think about, which also added to the time needed to read this story. I found it was best for me to read pieces (layers) at a time, then take some time to mull it over.

He says on page 364 of my copy, "there is no need to lay the blame on forebears or lovers.." and then carries on with his thoughts, to end the passage with a major idea of the book, which has stayed with me (found on page 365): "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."

The use of the image of Boabdil, the Sultan, looking back in unspeakable grief toward the lost Alhambra served Rushdie's story beautifully. I loved the book, and will likely return to it for another reading.

Leggendo questo romanzo, sembra di essere in uno di quei scenari tipici dell'America del sud, di Macondo, per la precisione. Solo che qui non siamo a Macondo, ma in India, una terra che profuma di pepe e cannella.
Una terra in cui le donne, da Aurora, la madre del Moro a Epifania sino a Isabella, sono le vere protagoniste, non solo della famiglia Da Gama, ma dell'India intera. Le donne sono le vere protagoniste, sono combattenti, sono determinate, sono loro che tengono in mano le redini della famiglia, sono loro il simbolo del lignaggio e della stirpe indiana.
"L'ultimo sospiro del Moro" è un canto d'amore verso l'India, una terra che tutto crea e tutto distrugge, una terra vitale e divisa, una terra che ci ha regalato uno scrittore di immensa caratura.

Brought this book for one purpose and one purpose only - to make me look like a Cultured American in Santa Teresa. French lady at the surf camp saw me reading it at breakfast one morning and went, “Salman Rushdie? He is wonderful,” so mission accomplished. However must add that I looked so confused reading it that more than one person asked if I was studying for an exam.

I don't think myself worthy of passing judgement upon this wonderful, artful piece of writing: far, far superior in league to even the most supreme thought I could conceive. This is a beautiful book, full of the kind of stories that only storytellers can truly comprehend.

This is also a Bombay book that immortalizes the city in the manner of the beloved of love songs. Rushdie's ardour for Bombay and his intimate knowledge of its history and its (in)famous inhabitants make this tale a veritable roman à clef, and I spent weeks trying to decode the clues he sprinkled like pepper all over his spicy narrative.

Rushdie's writing is not for everyone and it took me a month to find myself on the other side of this magical maze he created, one that I willingly got lost in, and which definitively succeeded in disorienting me.

Rüşdi’nin bu tarzda yazdığı kitaplardan okuduklarım arasında üçüncüsü oldu. Diğer ikisi Geceyarısı Çocukları ve Floransa Büyücüsü. Bu kitap diğerleri kadar hoşuma gitmedi açıkçası. Bu hoşuma gitmeyişin nedenlerinin aslında diğer kitaplarda da bulunduğunu geriye dönük düşündüğüm zaman fark ediyorum. Onlarda bunları göz ardı edeceğim kadar ilgi çekici içerik vardı belki de.

Bu kitapta da yine kahramanın hayatı tarihte yaşanmış önemli olaylarla kesişiyor, romanın kurgu karakterleri bu olayların içinde “tarihi yapanlardan” mış’ı öğreniyoruz. Yine arada kalmış bir büyülü gerçekçilik durumu var. Yani bu öğelerden on tane var diyelim kitapta. Her biri kendi başına ele alındığında düşük ihtimalli fakat mümkün durumlar, olaylar ardarda eklendiğinde bir büyü atmosferi yaratıyor. Yazar bunların bazılarında perdeyi kaldırıp aslında büyünün kafamızda olduğunu gösteriyor. (Sanırım bu kitapta bu perdeyi kaldırma diğer ikisinden daha fazla var. ) Romanın akışı içerisinde yazarımızın araya serpiştirdiği hikmetlere veya sanata, tarihe referanslarına rastlıyoruz, ancak bunlar bağlamdan kopuk olmadığından benim için can sıkıcı değil. Bunların hepsine tamam, gelelim sevmediklerime.

Romancılar dünya kurarlar. Okurlar da okurken, romancı onları bu dünyanın içine çekebildiği nispette, bu dünyanın bir parçası olurlar. O dünyanın normali okurun normali olur. Romancı kurduğu dünyayı tepetaklak ettiğinde ise okur şaşırır, heyecanlanır, üzülür , ikileme düşer, düşünür, vs. Ancak ikinci safhaya geçildiği sırada okurun romancının dünyasını “satın almış” olması gerekiyor. Bu kitabın dünyasında ise bir bağlamda normal olan iş, başka bir bağlamda anormal olabiliyor veya sıkışık bir durumdan büyülü bir müdahale ile bir örnekte çıkılabiliyorken diğerinde bu mümkün olmuyor. Dolayısıyla bu kitapta bu dünya bir türlü kurulamadı benim için.

Kitabın sonunu getirirken zorlayan bir diğer unsur gereksiz karakter trafiği oldu. Mesela Saatleri Ayarlama Enstitüsü’nde kitabın başlarında bir çok karakter girer çıkar, olaylar olur fakat daha sonra yolcusunu toplamak için ara sokaklara dalmış olan dolmuş otobana çıkar, gideceği yere gider. Mağripli’de sürekli ara sokaklarda dolaşıyoruz. Ana karakter(ler)in derinine, olanların nedenine nasılına, şunlar başka olsaydı böyle de olabilirdi’sine hiç derinlemesine bakamıyoruz para üstü vermekten. Tabi “her eserin bir önermesi, varmak iddiasında olduğu bir noktası olmak zorunda değil” denebilir ancak benim anladığım kadarıyla bu kitap varmak istediği yerleri olan bir kitap. Fakat yukarıda belirttiğim sebepten yolculuk çok yorucu oldu.

A long generational saga from India that begins during the colonial rule through the painful split into the 1990s. The Zogoiby family are wealthy Christian spice merchants. And there’s a lot of family drama. Everyone is a bit crazy. The narrator is called Moor, born as the last child eight years after his three sisters, who were born in quick succession. His mother Aurora is indeed a bright star, a famous painter who married at age 15 to a man her father’s age, and Abraham happened to be Jewish. Of course that was a problem. He takes over the family business and turns it into an empire.

The book is well written, sometimes humorous, and very witty. I did not like the book. I wanted to quit reading nearly the entire time. But it’s Rushdie and I never have read a book of his, and this one I’ve had sitting on my shelf for way too many years. So I pushed myself to read it through. I guess I’m happy to have finished, to have not wondered how the book ends, but as the rest of it, a bit ridiculous and odd.

There are many who have tagged this book as magical realism and that is a type of book that I typically don’t enjoy, but the “magical” aspect found here is not heavy handed. Some of the characters see things that aren’t there, but then just about everyone is a little bit crazy too, so it does match their character.
I’m not going to rush out and read another Rushdie book anytime soon.

Book rating: 3.25

Rushdie one of those authors whose command of English is so good that anything I write about his work always looks shoddy by comparison - but here goes.

This is a universal book. I mean that not in the sense that it is a book which applies to everyone, or which everyone can read - indeed, the forests of references and allusions are often so thick that it can be hard to find one's way through at times. What i mean is that it is a novel which contains universes - Rushdie's arcing, cinematic ambition animates the prose, permeates the narrative and saturates the themes.

But those themes - what are they? What is this book *about*? That's the hardest question to answer. "The Moor's Last Sigh" is, like its (main?) antagonist, Uma Sarasvati, a chameleon. It is, by turns, a novel about throwing off colonial shackles and about postcolonial Indian national identity, a broader novel about what nationhood means, a novel about religion and its personal and societal effects (cf the story about Flory Zogoiby and the Jews of Cochin), a novel about the rise of hindu nationalism in Indian politics (cf the Raman Fielding character), a novel about personal identity and acceptance (cf Aires de Gama and Henry the Navigator and the development of their relationship with Carmen, as well as the narrator's struggle to come to terms with his condition), a novel about the cosmopolitanism of the city of Bombay, a novel about maternal love and the effects of its denial, a novel about art and art criticism, and a novel about the (ultimately defeated, but still worthwhile) search for love. Maybe it is about all of these things, or none of them. Maybe, as I like to think, it is a novel about mythmaking - and we each take what we subjectively see in its pages as the true meaning of the book.

I can't give it the full 5 stars, though, because the second half of the book seemed slightly unlikely. I could not believe Mainduck and Vasco Miranda as two of the main villains of the piece, nor could I believe the revelations about Abraham at the end. More importantly, though - because the novel is so all-encompassing, and so technically spectacular in the way it shifts between perspectives and timelines, it can often be a bit impersonal - so the reader doesn't *feel* things when they happen. It's a shame.

See Rushdie’s eye-brows and get an idea of his writing style – witty, mischievous, unruly. One needs to have some preparation before starting any of his books. Both in terms of state of mind and of India’s history/politics/religions.

During the first 10 pages I thought reading could last forever and with insufficient understanding. However, as soon as I reached page 20 reading/comprehension started to flow smoothly. By the middle of the book I was enchanted by the story and the playfulness of the language. I could distinguish the familiar topics of Rushdie’s other books, this time through the melodramatic Da Gama-Zogoiby clan. The family tree in the beginning is helpful but maybe it is a kind of a spoiler – I knew in advance who would be born/dead and when.

Major (usual) themes:

Mother India

“Mother India with her garishness and her inexhaustible motion, Mother India who loved and betrayed and ate and destroyed and again loved her children, and with whom the children's passionate conjoining and eternal quarrel stretched long beyond the grave.”

Religion/atheism, with specific Christian-Jew (&Muslim, & Hindu) entanglements in this book.

“I, however, was raised neither as Catholic nor as 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?--atomised. Yessir: a real Bombay mix.”

Politics and History - the “Discovery” of India; Gandhi/Nehru, Independence, Partition, Emergency; East-West

“…characterising India as the one Third World economy capable of rivalling the First World in its sophistication and growth without necessarily becoming enslaved by the almighty US dollar, and suggested that many other Third World countries would leap at the chance to buy a high-quality talcum powder for which no greenback payments were required.” n  
n  “… the Too-Tall Lenin, the Too-Short Lenin, the Too-Fat Lenin, the Too-Skinny Lenin, the Too-Lame Lenin, the Too-Bald Lenin, and (this was a misfortunate fellow with gravely defective orthodonture) Lenin the Too-Thless...”n

Wealth/poverty, economy- underground and “overground”

“A mere fifteen years later, however, when official sources revealed that just one and a half per cent of the country's companies owned over half of all private capital, and that even within this elite one and a half per cent, just twenty companies dominated the rest, and that within these twenty companies there were four super-groups who controlled, between them, one quarter of all the share capital in India, the da Gama-Zogoiby C-5O Corporation had already risen to number five.”
“The city itself, perhaps the whole country, was a palimpsest, Under World beneath Over World, black market beneath white; when the whole of life was like this, when an invisible reality moved phantomwise beneath a visible fiction, subverting all its meanings, how then could Abraham's career have been any different? How could any of us have escaped that deadly layering?”

“…she had successfully proved the existence of the invisible buildings, she failed to establish the reality of the invisible people who built them. They continued to -be classified as phantoms, to move through the city like wraiths, except that these were the wraiths that kept the city going, building its houses, hauling its goods, cleaning up its droppings, and then simply and terribly dying, each in their turn, unseen, as their spectral blood poured out of their ghostly mouths in the middle of the bitch-city's all-too-real, uncaring streets.”

In-family feuds, probably an allusion to the Partition of India.
These family relations may remind of soap operas but Rushdie is lavish in irony, exaggeration and absurdity, and interweaves them with current and past history. Characters are vested in utmost meanness, sometimes close to madness.

“…for this was in the time of the divided house, which had chalk lines drawn across its floors, like frontiers, and spice-sacks piled up across courtyards, forming little walls, as though they were defences against the risk of floods, or sniper fire.”

“What started with perfume ended with a very big stink indeed...”

Women – always mighty driving forces in Rushdie’s books:

“The women are now moving to the centre of my little stage. Epifania, Carmen, Belle, and the newly arrived Aurora — they, not the men, were the true protagonists in the struggle; and inevitably, it was Great-Grandmother Epifania who was the troublemaker-in-chief.”

“Epifania swallowed the news of his death without a tremor. She ate his death as she had eaten his life; and grew.”

Mothers (Aurora)

“And we spent our lives living up, down and sideways to her predictions... did I mention that she was irresistible? Listen: she was the light of our lives, the excitement of our imaginations, the beloved of our dreams. We loved her even as she destroyed us. She called out of us a love that felt too big for our bodies, as if she had made the feeling and then given it to us to feel--as if it were a work. If she trampled over us, it was because we lay down willingly beneath her spurred-and-booted feet; if she excoriated us at night, it was on account of our delight at the sweet lashings of her tongue. It was when I finally realised this that I forgave my father; for we were all her slaves, and she made our servitude feel like Paradise. Which is, they say, what goddesses can do.”

Well, fathers are there too, though deceitfully invisible:
“My unforgivable father, whom I forgave...”

“Children make fictions of their fathers, re-inventing them according to their childish needs. The reality of a father is a weight few sons can bear.”

Spices. And love.

“Pepper love: that's how I think of it. Abraham and Aurora fell in pepper love, up there on the Malabar Gold. They came down from those high stacks with more than their clothes smelling of spice. So passionately had they fed upon one another, so profoundly had sweat and blood and the secretions of their bodies mingled, in that foetid atmosphere heavy with the odours of cardamom and cumin, so intimately had they conjoined, not only with each other but with what-hung-on-the-air, yes, and with the spice-sacks themselves--some of which, it must be said, were torn, so that peppercorns and elaichees poured out and were crushed between legs and bellies and thighs--that, for ever after, they sweated pepper'n'spices sweat, and their bodily fluids, too, smelled and even tasted of what had been crushed into their skins, what had mingled with their love-waters, what had been breathed in from the air during that transcendent fuck.”

Surprisingly, the aspect that I expected to be most appealing to me – Art – was least interesting. I could not imagine the great artist Aurora. I was not sympathetic to the Moor (while Saleem of ‘Midnight’s Children’ is still my most beloved character of all of Rushdie’s books). All characters, introduced after the Moor’s childhood, seemed to me vague and implausible, the events - as if thought out by another author. In fact I could hardly stand the developments and the narration in Parts III and IV, contrary to my enthusiasm in Parts I and II. Overall, I perceived “The Moor’s Last Sigh” mostly as a family story, with the usual India-implications, but I missed the magic of the other Rushdie books.

This time I didn’t like the protagonist addressing the reader: “Reader!”, the abundance of exclamations “O!”, parenthesis and ellipsis. No doubt the language is impressive: “Indian” English; Rushdie-invented words and phrases; wordplay; irony. I guess he knows (and employs) all existing words in the English language.

In ‘Moor’s Last Sigh’, Salman Rushdie has captured the spirit of Mumbai city; the way he has done it before with India in ‘Midnight’s children’. There is everything in there which you come to associate with Mumbai - Bollywood, cricket, art, politics, gang war etc.

There are a lot of similarities with Midnight children. Both Saleem Sinai and Moor, for example, have joint families, find themselves attached in multiple ways to history. Midnight’s children though is on more grand scale and is definitely more recognized. In fact, Saleem Sinai’s adopted son also has a minor role to play in ‘Moor’s last Sigh’.

Moor’s last sigh is sorrow he felt which he, who by the way aged twice as fast as a normal person and has a hammer head, felt as he had to leave everything behind. For more than first half, women dominate the scene and among them too, it is mostly Aurora who rules the book. For first one-third part, Moor is not even born.

Moor is at same time somewhat humanized version of Mumbai and an allegory on life of Boabdil, the last moor. Boabdil was also known as Zogobi - the unlucky one; which became protagonist's surname. His looking back in regret after leaving Mumbai perfectly justifies the title. Baodil's mother on seeing him weep had said to him, "Thou dost weep like a woman for what thou couldst not defend as a man." The same remark which Merenda made when Moor refuse to make a useless effort to protect his fellow prisoner, who was introduced in last few pages just to complete the allegory.

Moor's father is a business man who started from spice trade (inherited from Cochin) and then diversified; and his mother is artist – thus showing two faces of city. Mumbai also started as a trade hub (mostly spice trade in the beginning) and is home to artists from all over the country.

Yet again, Rushdi spins the fact and fiction into a magical cobweb. The Moor’s Last Sigh and The Kissing of Abbas Ali Beg are actual paintings based on actual events. There was actually a medical student from Mumbai, who won Ms. Universe contest in 1967 (though similarity ends there).‘Raman Fielding’ (RAMan fielding) is Rushdi’s take on Bal Thackeray (– thus the book was not much liked by later). Both started as cartoonists; went onto become Hindu extremist heads; tried to rewrite the history and both play regional politics.

The book is full of typical Rushdie Masala including references to children’s books, Bollywood histories; family feuds; magical realism and word plays (my favorite being the thing he does with Aurora’s children - Inni, Minni, Mini, Moor.)

well i got to 47% before I COULD NOT TAKE IT ANYMORE!

This is a brain on psychedelics, exploding, unexpurgated - and it never. ever. never. ever. stops.

There is nothing normal here. No one is just someone - they are the genius saint painter of India, they have hair to the floor, they don't have a leg, they are a secret crime boss, they talk to parrots, they are living twice the speed of time, they are red priests, they are super cali fragilistic expliala docious.

I can't take it any more. Clearly Rushdie is a writer of amazing talent, but really, it's just too much. I don't have time for an LSD trip that just won't end.