What is The Moor's Last Sigh about?

The Moor's Last Sigh is narrated by Moraes Zogoiby — the Moor — a man who ages at twice the normal rate and has only months to live. Half Hindu, half Jewish, with Portuguese colonial ancestry and a criminal empire in the background, he is a walking emblem of mixed-blood India. His story is really his family's story, stretching back generations to the spice merchants of Kerala, and centered most obsessively on his mother Aurora Zogoiby, a painter of world-historical ambition and maternal catastrophe.

The novel is fundamentally about India — its contradictions, its capacity for both splendor and violence, its layers of religious and cultural identity compressed into a single geography. Aurora's paintings, especially her Moor series depicting a fantasia of tolerance and hybridity, stand against the novel's increasingly violent backdrop of Hindu nationalism and organized crime. The book was published the year after the Bombay riots, and Rushdie's anger at communalist violence is unmistakable even through the fabular surface.

Rushdie writes in the tradition of Rabelais and García Márquez — digressive, carnivalesque, crammed with puns and allusions and set-piece virtuosity. The prose is exhausting in the best possible way. There is a strand here about the theft of paintings and a sinister character named Vasco Miranda that pushes the novel toward something like a Gothic thriller in its final section, set in Spain, where the historical Moors made their last sigh before exile. The symmetry is deliberate and somewhat heavy-handed, but the emotional payoff is real.

Readers who loved Midnight's Children will find familiar DNA here — the narrator cursed with a special body, history personalized through family myth, India rendered as magic and wound. Readers approaching Rushdie for the first time may find The Moor's Last Sigh more accessible in some ways (the timeline is mostly linear) and harder in others (the prose density never relents). It rewards patience and a tolerance for a narrator who is simultaneously charming and self-deceiving.