The Moor's Last Sigh
Salman Rushdie
434 pages
Published in 1995
It was the cover that drew me to this book. It stood out amongst the rows of novels at my local library. Then I noticed who the author was and I had to read it. The Moor's Last Sigh is the first novel of Rushdie I've read: I've always wanted to try his fiction but been afraid to as I thought it would be too difficult.Fortunately, this fear was ungrounded. Rushdie is actually quite an engaging writer, clear and easy to follow but very much with his own style of writing. His style is intoxicating, exotic withouth being cloying and very easy to drift away on.
The Moor of the title is the last scion of an old spicetraders familie, the Da Gama-Zogoiby family of Cochin. the story of his family's rise and fall is his Confession, written down just before he fears he will die. His story starts in the 1920ties and ends with himself, in the near present. He tells about his great grandparents, grandparents, parents and siblings, their feuds and loves and inbetween we also get to hear the story of himself, his downfall and what caused it. Interwoven in the story is the theme of Granada, the last Moorish bulwark in Spain and its fall in 1492, this as an extended metaphor for the eventual fall of the Moor himself.
But The Moor's Last Sigh is not just a story about one family, it is also the story about the history of modern India and its follies. In fact, it seems that a caricature present in the book of a leading Hindu-nationalistic politician led to The Moor's Last Sigh not being published in India!
On the whole I quite liked The Moor's Last Sigh, but once the narrative had reached the Moor's own story the story lost some of its drive; the last third was a bit pedestrian and especially the ending. What I liked was the way in which Rushdie presents the (to me) exotic, the Indianness of the book, so matter of factly, unforced and natural. Despite it somewhat grand scale, The Moor's Last Sigh stays playful, funny and sarky. Despite the disappointing ending a very enjoyable and worthwhile book.
