In Salman Rushdie's remarkable novel, the narrator describes the
astonishing paintings created by his mother: paintings teeming with the
life of Bombay's streets, paintings that capture "the face-slapping
quarrels of naked children at a tenement standpipe," "the elated
tension of the striking sailors at the gates to the naval yards" and
the "shipwrecked arrogance of the Bombay officers from whom power was
ebbing like the waves," paintings layered upon older paintings and
concealing untold secrets of the past. Behind all this, the
narrator observes, was his mother's "sense of the inadequacy of the
world, of its failure to live up to her expectations, so that her own
disappointment with reality, her anger at its wrongness, mirrored her
subjects', and made her sketches not merely reportorial but personal,
with a violent, breakneck passion of line that had the force of a
physical assault." This description, of course, also applies
perfectly to Mr. Rushdie's own fierce, phantasmagorical writing,
especially as practiced in "The Moor's Last Sigh," a huge, sprawling,
exuberant novel. Filled with allusions to everything from "Tristram
Shandy" to "The Lone Ranger," from "Paradise Lost" to "Alice in
Wonderland," and crammed full with puns, wordplay, vulgar jokes and
lyrical asides, "The Moor's Last Sigh" is many books at the same time:
a demented family saga, a twisted Bildungsroman, an exploration of the
uses and misuses of art and a dark historical parable that rivals Mr.
Rushdie's 1981 masterpiece, "Midnight's Children," in scope,
inventiveness and ambition. Like "Midnight's Children," "The
Moor's Last Sigh" traces the downward spiral of expectations
experienced by India as post-independence hopes for democracy crumbled
during the emergency rule declared by Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in
1975, and early dreams of pluralism gave way to sectarian violence and
political corruption. In "Midnight's Children," India's fate was
incarnated in the lives of 1,001 children born during the first hour of
Indian independence, magically gifted children whose talents and hopes
would later be cruelly destroyed. In "The Moor's Last Sigh," India's
fate is similarly embodied in the ups and downs of the da Gama-Zogoiby
family, and more specifically in the raucous adventures of the clan's
last surviving member, Moraes Zogoiby, otherwise known as Moor. As
the narrator of this rude-noisy-poetic free-for-all, Moor proves
himself a high-spirited if sometimes long-winded Scheherazade, a
spinner of tales and ancestral legends, whose life -- we later learn --
literally depends upon his singing the saga of his family's past. Certainly
Moor has a lot in common with his own creator, Mr. Rushdie. To begin
with, Mr. Rushdie's own unhappy fate -- his last full-length novel,
"The Satanic Verses," enraged Muslim fundamentalists and prompted
Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini to issue a "death sentence" against him in
1989 -- is alluded to in Moor's story. Not only does Moor find himself
imprisoned (and put under sentence of death) by a zealot who likes to
dress up as a Sultan, but he is also condemned to live out his days in
exile, an unmoored Moor, "a nobody from nowhere, like no-one, belonging
to nothing." Mr. Rushdie, however, does not belabor his own story in "The Moor's
Last Sigh.
" Rather, he turns Moor -- a bastard child who suffers from a
rare genetic disorder that causes him to age at twice the usual rate --
into an emblematic figure who shares India's plight, the plight of a
country forced to grow up too quickly, "without time for proper
planning," without time to learn from experience, "without time for
reflection." In fact, Moor's entire family seems like a
dysfunctional mess, what with its bloody history of schisms and
betrayals, great passions and terrible acts of vengeance. Two sides of
his mother's family battled each other for years beforwas decreed; another family standoff
pitted a brother who was a committed nationalist against a brother who
was pro-British. The romance between Moor's Catholic mother and Jewish
father nearly ended in a Romeo-Juliet debacle. His grandfather and
great-grandfather both ended their lives by walking into the sea. And
his great-grandmother died with a curse on her lips: "May your house be
forever partitioned, may its foundations turn to dust, may your
children rise up against you, and may your fall be hard." While this story may sound in summary
like a portentous parody of a Greek tragedy, the effect is very
different given Mr. Rushdie's manic sense of humor and rich,
improvisatory zeal. It's as though he had decided to cast the House of
Atreus saga with vaudevillians, clowns and Lear-like fools, players
whose story, however tragic, is also funny, tender and sad. The
didacticism of the novel's overarching theme -- the fate of modern
India as illustrated by the da Gama-Zogoiby clan -- is similarly
disguised by Mr. Rushdie's ability to conjure up Borgesian images and
Marquezian diversions out of thin air: a series of enchanted tiles that
foretell the future; a stuffed dog that houses the ghost of Jawaharlal
Nehru; a group of actors all dressed up like Lenin; a magical painting
invested with the secrets of the past. The
reader may also notice certain parallels between Mr. Rushdie's story
and the story of Moor's mother, Aurora, whose playful painting of a
kiss between a Muslim cricket player and a pretty Hindu girl elicits a
political firestorm. "I witnessed both her ennui at having endlessly to
defend it," Moor recalls, "and her fury at the ease with which this
'teapot monsoon' had distracted attention from the body of her real
work. She was required by the public prints to speak ponderously of
'underlying motives' when she had had only whims, to make moral
statements where there had been only ('only'!) play, and feeling, and
the unfolding inexorable logic of brush and light."GET THIS BOOK FREE.BUY SELL RENT BOOKS FROM THE LINK BELOW.