THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Sunday, March 3, 1996 TAG: 9602290593
SECTION: COMMENTARY PAGE: J2 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Book Review
SOURCE: BY LENORE HART
LENGTH: Medium: 89 lines
THE MOOR'S LAST SIGH
A Novel
SALMAN RUSHDIE
Pantheon. 435 pp. $25.
It's been said that if a writer isn't making someone mad, he's not doing his job. Salman Rushdie has obviously taken this to heart. Forget bad reviews. Rushdie managed, with The Satanic Verses, to enrage all Iran, earning a death sentence. Now he's persona non grata in India. His latest novel has been banned there.
A pity for India's readers. The Moor's Last Sigh is delightful, imaginative and thought-provoking.
It's the testament of Moraes ``Moor'' Zogoiby, son of an ancient Portuguese merchant family from Bombay. Moor is now wandering Andalusia, clutching the family history he wrote while imprisioned by a madman. Escape is bittersweet, because he's near death.
His mother, Aurora da Gama, was a famous surrealist painter; his father, business mogul Abraham Zogoiby. Aurora claimed dark-skinned Moor gestated in only four-and-a-half months, perhaps to conceal an affair. But he's born with progeria, and ages twice as fast as normal; at 35 he looks 70. He's also a near-giant, a bearded schoolboy who stood 6-foot-6 before puberty. His life has been reclusive - where on earth would he fit in?
Aurora gains artistic celebrity while Abraham whips the family spice business into a Mafia-like conglomerate.
Moor, her favorite model, obsesses on her mythical land of ``Mooristan,'' where, she colloquially explains, ``worlds collide, flow in and out of one another, and washofy away . . . an airman can drowno in water, or else grow gills . . . a water creature can get drunk, but also chokeofy, on air. One universe, one dimension, one country, one dream, bumpo'ing into another, or being under, or on top of . . . And above it all, in the palace, you.''
Revenge, deceptions, murders, ghosts, closeted skeletons, insanity, illicit desires: The overwrought family-saga genre is wickedly lampooned with Rushdie's exotic imagery, outrageous puns and Dickensian-Indian names. The Zogoiby kids (three daughters, one son) are Ina, Minnie, Mynah, Moor. Cleaning products are labeled Hope, Love, Serenity. A scion of Abraham's toughest competitor is named Jamibhoy Lifebhoy Cashondeliveri.
Rushdie has been in hiding seven years, and there are unmistakable references to his predicament: Moor's right hand - his writing hand - is club-shaped. He's forced to become left-handed, only finding use for the right when he's briefly an enforcer (``With my bare hand I clubbed my victims . . . like carpets, like mules.'') for his father's enemies. By then he's revolted by Abraham's dealings (narcotics, child prostitution) and his mother's adulterous affairs. His one great love ended so perversely those same parents disowned him.
The Zogoibys make the quirky clans of Magical Realism seem like Latino Ozzies and Harriets. But the story, covering 1900 to the present, has a larger canvas: India's independence struggle, partition and the rise of religious fundamentalism. It's a caveat on political corruption, absolutist religion and moral indifference.
Rushdie's prose charbroils the world's sacred cows. He speculates about the sex life of an icon, Nehru. He names a dog after him.
The Moor's Last Sigh has offended India's fundamentalists. Unfortunately, religion generates one of its few flaws, too. Villains abound, but the most coldblooded and irredeemable one is (what else?) Jewish. Abraham Zogoiby makes Shakespeare's Shylock seem like date material.
We're constantly reminded he's J-E-W-I-S-H. Perhaps only to illustrate that Religion's trappings cannot defeat the human evil. But with scads of anti-Semitic literature circulating underground and above, what motivated Rushdie to add more?
Moor's women are as fascinating, smart, eccentric, strong, unscrupulous and cruel as . . . well, as men. But they're not held up to the same rigorous moral scrutiny as Rushdie's male characters.
Aurora never concerns herself with the origins of the money that funds her political-activist art. So the demonic portrayal of Abraham seems all the more heavyhanded.
Still, The Moor's Last Sigh is engrossing, a fairy tale both beastly and beautiful - and an elegant backhand to the forces of suppression, everywhere. MEMO: Lenore Hart is a novelist who lives on the Eastern Shore. ILLUSTRATION: Photo
Salman Rusdie
by CNB