File spoon-archives/postcolonial.archive/postcolonial_1996/96-02-20.131, message 8


Date: Tue, 2 Jan 1996 07:40:24 -0800
From: brians-AT-wsu.edu (Paul Brians)
Subject: The Moor's Last Sigh


My enterprising daughter managed to import from Britain a copy of Salman
Rushdie's new novel, _The Moor's Last Sigh_ to give me for Christmas. I've
just finished it, and thought I would share a few notes on it.

It is reminiscent of _Midnight's Children_, but it lacks the strong
political themes of that novel. Besides various asides aimed at the
Gandhis, its most pointed political passage is a brief section dealing with
the communal violence over the Babri Masjid at Ayodhya and the subsequent
bombings in Bombay.

The style is Rushdie's but the content is strikingly similar to John
Irving's _A Son of the Circus_, a similarity Rushdie notes by making a
subtle allusion to that novel on p. 264, where he lists various fictional
detectives, including "Inspector Dhar," one of the main characters in
Irving's novel.

Zeenat Vakil, a name familiar from _Satanic Verses_, turns up again, this
time as a contemporary art critic who uses language familiar to subscribers
to this list: "Imperso-Nation and Dis/Semi/Nation: Dialogics of Eclecticism
and Interrogations of Authenticity in A. Z" ( p. 329, spoofing Bhabha,
right? "A. Z." is Aurora Zagoiby, the protagonist's mother and a modern
artist).

Rushdie makes a couple of allusions to the Internet and the Web (a
nightclub is called "The World Wide Web").  I would be very surprised if he
wasn't exploring the Internet quite a lot, given his isolated
circumstances; though I doubt he'd subscribe to this list because of
security reasons.

Despite the fact that his work has been rejected by some Indian critics as
the work of a hostile emigre/outsider, it strongly resembles in content and
attitude a number of other contemporary Indian novels. It might almost have
been written to refute the argument that Rushdie is not a truly Indian
writer.




Paul Brians, Department of English,Washington State University
Pullman, WA 99164-5020
brians-AT-wsu.edu
http://www.wsu.edu:8080/~brians




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