The Moor’s Last Sigh
Synopsis
What do we do when the world’s walls - its family structures, its value-systems, its political forms - crumble? The central character of this novel, ‘Moor’ Zogoiby, only son of a wealthy, artistic-bohemian Bombay family, finds himself in such a moment of crisis. His mother, a famous painter and an emotional despot, worships beauty, but Moor is ugly, he has a deformed hand. Moor falls in love, with a married woman; when their secret is revealed, both are expelled; a suicide pact is proposed, but only the woman dies. Moor chooses to accept his fate, plunges into a life of depravity in Bombay, then becomes embroiled in a major financial scandal. The novel ends in Spain, in the studio of a painter who was a lover of Moor’s mother: in a violent climax Moor has, once more, to decide whether to save the life of his lover by sacrificing his own.
Author Biography
Salman Rushdie was born in Bombay in June 1947. His second novel, the acclaimed Midnight’s Children, was published in 1981. It won the Booker Prize for Fiction, the James Tait Black Memorial Prize (for fiction), an Arts Council Writers’ Award and the English-Speaking Union Award, and in 1993 was judged to have been the ‘Booker of Bookers’, the best novel to have won the Booker Prize for Fiction in the award’s 25-year history. His fourth novel, The Satanic Verses (1988), lead to the Iranian leadership issuing a fatwa against him. Despite the fatwa the novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize and won the Whitbread Novel Award in 1988. Salman Rushdie continued to write and publish books, including a children’s book, Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990) and was nominated for the Man Booker International Prize in 2007. Salman Rushdie became a KBE in 2007.
