Word: sighingly
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NEAR THE END OF THE MOOR'S Last Sigh (Pantheon; 434 pages; $25), a madman holds the novel's narrator, Moraes Zogoiby, prisoner. The captor, an old but rejected friend of Zogoiby's late, flamboyant mother, demands a history of her family before killing its teller. "He had made a Scheherazade of me," Moraes writes. "As long as my tale held his interest he would let me live...
...death sentence takes on a certain poignance. And the temptation exists, since he is the West's most prominent enforced recluse, to read everything he has written since the Ayatullah Khomeini's infamous fatwa in 1988 as a comment on his personal dilemma. But The Moor's Last Sigh--Rushdie's first novel since The Satanic Verses--should not be taken only, or even principally, as veiled autobiography. It is much too teeming and turbulent, too crammed with history and dreams, to fit into any imaginable category, except that of the magically comic...
...about recent Indian history, although elements of both are undeniably present. And when his narrator gets a bit preachy, he quickly cuts himself off: "Enough, enough: away with this soap-box! Unplug this loud-hailer, and be still, my wagging finger!" The true subject of The Moor's Last Sigh is language in all its uninhibited and unpredictable power to go reality one better and rescue humans from the fate of suffering in silence...
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...
...agree that there was no one factor and no one moment that tipped the balance--not even the obvious ones. His family heard the rumors that they had somehow vetoed his running. "There was a lot more to it than that," says Michael, as he pauses, lets out a sigh and begins to tell what happened. "I hear 'It was Alma' all the time. Well, it wasn't just Alma. This is a much more sophisticated, subtle story than that...