Editors Reads Verdict
Rushdie's most warmly human novel — a multigenerational Bombay family epic told by a narrator who ages at twice the normal rate, packed with art, crime, spice, and the grief of a city losing its pluralist soul.
What We Loved
- Rushdie's most emotionally accessible novel — the warmth and humor here are in balance with the political satire
- Aurora Zogoiby, Moor's painter mother, is one of the great characters in contemporary fiction
- The portrait of Bombay's cosmopolitan Jewish-Christian-Muslim-Hindu culture is a sustained act of historical imagination
Minor Drawbacks
- The novel's final section, set in Spain, is somewhat less convincing than the Bombay material
- Rushdie's punning linguistic exuberance occasionally tips into self-indulgence
Key Takeaways
- → Hybrid identity — the mixture of faiths, cultures, and bloods — is both a personal gift and a political vulnerability
- → Bombay's twentieth-century history is a story of cosmopolitanism betrayed by religious nationalism
- → Art cannot finally protect its maker — Aurora's paintings witness but cannot prevent the violence surrounding them
- → The 'Moor's last sigh' — the legendary regret of the last Moorish king of Granada — echoes through the loss of every pluralist culture
| Author | Salman Rushdie |
|---|---|
| Publisher | Vintage |
| Pages | 435 |
| Published | September 1, 1995 |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Magical Realism, Literary Fiction, Indian Literature |
The Moor’s Last Sigh Review
The Moor’s Last Sigh, published in 1995 while Rushdie was still living under the fatwa, is the novel in which he returned to the Bombay epic mode of Midnight’s Children — and in some ways surpassed it in warmth, humor, and emotional depth. Where Midnight’s Children is narrated by a man whose identity is precisely coextensive with the Indian nation, The Moor’s Last Sigh is narrated by a man whose identity is precisely excessive: too mixed, too hybrid, too various for any single national narrative to contain.
Moraes “Moor” Zogoiby is the product of four generations of tangled Bombay history: Jewish and Catholic blood, spice merchants and criminals, saints and reprobates. He ages at twice the normal rate — a magical condition that functions as the novel’s central metaphor for the accelerating losses of modern Indian life — and tells his family’s story from a castle in Spain, racing to finish before his body gives out. His mother Aurora, a brilliant, difficult, politically engaged painter, dominates the novel with her large, infuriating, utterly compelling presence. Their relationship — devoted, competitive, destructive — is the novel’s emotional core and its greatest achievement.
Aurora’s paintings of the Moor — her son as the last Moorish king of Granada, looking back at the paradise he has lost — give the novel its controlling image: the Al-Andalus of medieval Spain, where Christian, Muslim, and Jew coexisted in productive tension, as the fantasy that underlies Bombay’s own cosmopolitan self-image. As the novel moves through the 1970s and 1980s, that cosmopolitan Bombay is systematically destroyed by religious nationalism — specifically by the figure of Raman Fielding, a Hindu chauvinist politician transparently modeled on Bal Thackeray — and the Zogoiby family is caught in the wreckage.
The novel’s last hundred pages, set in Spain where Moor is trying to recover a stolen painting, are somewhat less fully realized than the Bombay sections — Rushdie’s imagination is most at home in the city he left. But the preceding three hundred pages are among the richest in his work: dense with Bombay’s languages, cuisines, film culture, and architecture, animated by Aurora’s enormous and difficult vitality, and informed by a grief for a pluralist culture that is losing the argument to its worst enemies. The Moor’s Last Sigh is the Rushdie novel that most rewards readers who have been put off by his more controversial work.
Frequently Asked Questions
What is "The Moor's Last Sigh" about?
Moraes 'Moor' Zogoiby narrates his family's baroque history in Bombay across four generations — Jewish, Christian, Muslim, Hindu blood tangled in a story of art, crime, love, and political violence. Rushdie's return to the multigenerational family epic after The Satanic Verses is his warmest and most humorous novel, full of Bombay's culinary, linguistic, and cultural richness.
What are the key takeaways from "The Moor's Last Sigh"?
Hybrid identity — the mixture of faiths, cultures, and bloods — is both a personal gift and a political vulnerability Bombay's twentieth-century history is a story of cosmopolitanism betrayed by religious nationalism Art cannot finally protect its maker — Aurora's paintings witness but cannot prevent the violence surrounding them The 'Moor's last sigh' — the legendary regret of the last Moorish king of Granada — echoes through the loss of every pluralist culture
Is "The Moor's Last Sigh" worth reading?
Rushdie's most warmly human novel — a multigenerational Bombay family epic told by a narrator who ages at twice the normal rate, packed with art, crime, spice, and the grief of a city losing its pluralist soul.
Ready to Read The Moor's Last Sigh?
Check the current price on Amazon.
Check Price on Amazon (paid link)Prices and availability are subject to change. See Amazon for current price.
Review last updated: