The Moor's Last Sigh - Softcover

Rushdie, Salman

3.93

13,988 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0394281977 ISBN 13: 9780394281971

Publisher: Vintage, 1996

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A ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. Moraes "Moor" Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.

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Review:

In The Moor's Last Sigh Salman Rushdie revisits some of the same ground he covered in his greatest novel, Midnight's Children. This book is narrated by Moraes Zogoiby, a.k.a. Moor, who speaks to us from a gravestone in Spain. Like Moor, Rushdie knows about a life spent in banishment from normal society--Rushdie because of the fatwa that followed The Satanic Verses, Moor because he ages at twice the rate of normal humans. Yet Moor's story of travail is bigger than Rushdie's; it encompasses a grand struggle between good and evil while Moor himself stands as allegory for Rushdie's home country of India. Filled with wordplay and ripe with humour, it is an epic work, and Rushdie has the tools to pull it off. He earned a 1995 Whitbread Prize for his efforts.

Review:

TIME Magazine's Best Book of the Year

"Fierce, phantasmagorical...a huge, sprawling, exuberant novel." The New York Times

"Rushdie, the author of nine previous books--including The Satanic Verses, which prompted Ayatollah Khomeini to issue his death sentence in 1989--alludes often to his own exile, the story of modern India and the dangers of art. At first the hyperbole, didactic asides, verbal puns, lyrical and lewd jokes, and slapstick routines seem a bit much, but if you stick with it, a cumulative magic takes hold. Rushdie's satiric, hysterically funny, political family tragedy is a masterpiece." Salon

"Salman Rushdie's greatest novel...held me is its thrall and provided the richest fictional experience of 1995." The Sunday Times
"The most complete and gratifying work to emerge from Salman Rushdie's imagination.... The Moor's Last Sigh is an exotic story, in its setting, in its characters, in its punning extravagance, and in its deeply human core. It is an extraordinary family saga...full of wonderful characters, and the insight born of genuine reflection...A remarkable spell of creativity." The Edmonton Journal
"A rich, wonderfully readable novel." Toronto Star

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