Word: moore
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...Moor's Last Sigh, Rushdie's first novel since the cataclysmic Satanic Verses, has been much anticpated as the exiled author's rebuttal of tyranny. But we must be careful to separate Rushdie's predicament (an accident, really, a grotesque ordering of political events) from Rushdie's product. That Rushdie is still alive seven years after the fatwah and that he is still able to write such fabulous tales is his response. The novel can and perhaps must be read as independent of the political issues...
...Moor's Last Sigh is a stunning novel. It is the story of four generations of a Portuguese family in India, as told by its last surviving progeny. The Da Gama-Zogoibys are rendered in full Rushdie relief. The Da Gamas are Catholic, the Zogoibys Jewish. Their combustible union is further complicated by issues of waning colonialism; family politics are intricately woven in with global politics to form a dizzying portrait of people handcuffed to time and place...
...novel is set against a larger historical metaphor: the expulsion of the Moors from Muslim Spain in 1492. Thus, the Moor's last sigh belongs both to this earlier displaced people and to the narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, nicknamed 'The Moor'. The family spice business, nearly destroyed by the bitter squabbles of one generation, is rescued by the next and eventually transformed into a fantastic and far-reaching crime syndicate. Moraes is betrayed by a beautiful vixen, imprisoned, and then released on the condition that he go to work as a goon for his father's rival crime boss. Aurora Zogoiby...
...that is the paradise from which the Moor is eventually ejected. But he holds on to its entertaining, eclectic energy in the telling of his sad tale. Puns and allusions--to everything from Shakespeare and Joyce to Bombay "Bollywood" movies--abound on nearly every page. Proper names hide tricks that only sounding them out against the inner ear will reveal; the Moor's businessman father takes over a failing firm called the House of Cashondeliveri...
Those who read novels as pale substitutes for movies--no pictures, no sound track--may find The Moor's Last Sigh tough sledding. But its leisurely wordiness is a mark of Rushdie's mastery. "In the end, stories are what's left of us," says the Moor. To tell and to read them here is to celebrate life...