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I decided to give Rushdie another chance after the indulgent drivel of Fury, figuring that anyone capable of producing something as marvelous as Midnight's Children has earned the right to commit a subsequent folly or two.
True enough, The Moor's Last Sigh is more like it, with Rushdie back on the familiar territory of that earlier masterwork, meaning it's set in India at the time of the Partition and the Emergency, and written in the magic realist style that owes so much to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Family events run parallel in time and meaning with public events, fortunes rise and fall, but Rushdie leaves us in no doubt that it will all end badly in treachery and murder.
I enjoyed it, though with some reservations.
A family with four generations of accumulating wealth founded on the spice industry, the Zogoiby-De Gamas (dubiously) trace their origins to the Portuguese founders of modern Cochin and the descendants of the last Moor of Grenada, Boabdil.
Typical of Rushdie, their family is full of forceful, furious and ill-fated women, watery men with visible ailments or weaknesses yet hidden strengths, and the story is replete with little flickers of fabulism - bereaved lovers wake from erotic dreams with scratches from their dead spouse, decorative temple tiles tell uncanny stories etc.
There is also a fabulous central conceit, that the narrator has lived his entire life from conception at double speed, therefore becoming a man while still a boy, a pensioner while still a young man.
The story is compelling enough, expertly told, linearly but with a great number of digressions and hints to what is to come. The writing is unquestionably impressive for the most part.
However, chief amongst my reservations is Rushdie's habit of fawningly cajoling the reader to empathise with his narrator and to admire just how clever Rushdie himself is as a writer. The man can't help it, he has to be admired at all costs.
When he sticks to his story, Rushdie is admirable. When he invites you to applaud him for telling it, he becomes insufferable.
True enough, The Moor's Last Sigh is more like it, with Rushdie back on the familiar territory of that earlier masterwork, meaning it's set in India at the time of the Partition and the Emergency, and written in the magic realist style that owes so much to Gabriel Garcia Marquez.
Family events run parallel in time and meaning with public events, fortunes rise and fall, but Rushdie leaves us in no doubt that it will all end badly in treachery and murder.
I enjoyed it, though with some reservations.
A family with four generations of accumulating wealth founded on the spice industry, the Zogoiby-De Gamas (dubiously) trace their origins to the Portuguese founders of modern Cochin and the descendants of the last Moor of Grenada, Boabdil.
Typical of Rushdie, their family is full of forceful, furious and ill-fated women, watery men with visible ailments or weaknesses yet hidden strengths, and the story is replete with little flickers of fabulism - bereaved lovers wake from erotic dreams with scratches from their dead spouse, decorative temple tiles tell uncanny stories etc.
There is also a fabulous central conceit, that the narrator has lived his entire life from conception at double speed, therefore becoming a man while still a boy, a pensioner while still a young man.
The story is compelling enough, expertly told, linearly but with a great number of digressions and hints to what is to come. The writing is unquestionably impressive for the most part.
However, chief amongst my reservations is Rushdie's habit of fawningly cajoling the reader to empathise with his narrator and to admire just how clever Rushdie himself is as a writer. The man can't help it, he has to be admired at all costs.
When he sticks to his story, Rushdie is admirable. When he invites you to applaud him for telling it, he becomes insufferable.
