Urbanist's Full Review: Salman Rushdie - The Moor's Last Sigh
This opinion marks a sad occasion, the news that one Islamic extremist group has announced a renewed death threat against Salman Rushdie for the alleged heresies that occur in his early novel The Satanic Verses. Apparently, they feel that now that he lives in the United States, his death would have more meaning. Or something.
There is no better time to buy and read the spectacular novel that Rushdie wrote during his first period in hiding, when the entire government of Iran was offering a bounty for his death. Slipping from place to place, never appearing in public, Rushdie penned The Moor's Last Sigh; to date, it remains his most generous, loving, hilarious, painful, and utterly engaging book.
When the Iranian mullahs first demanded Rushdie's death, the coverage of the story in the mainstream press inevitably referred to Rushdie's work as intellectual, difficult, complex. In other words, high-speed journalists had glanced at it, saw nothing that looked like journalism, and didn't have the time or attention to read more closely.
So if you've never read any Salman Rushdie, you've probably heard that he's intellectual, allusive, and perhaps difficult to read. To which, Reader, in one of his many styles, may I reply, fair ladies and gentlemen, simply: Pfftht! Try out this little passage from The Moor's Last Sigh. You don't need context, because the situation is universal: an enraged woman has shut her husband out of her rooms.
For several nights Abraham mewled piteously at her locked door, but was not admitted. At length, Cyrano-fashion, he hired a local accordionist and ballad-singer who serenaded her in the courtyard below her window, while he, Abraham, stood idiotically beside the music man and mouthed the words of old love-songs. Aurora opened her shutters, and threw flowers; then the water from the flower-vase; and finally the vase itself. All three scored direct hits. The vase, a heavy piece of stoneware, struck Abraham on his left ankle, breaking it. He was taken, wet and yowling, to hospital, and thereafter did not try to change her mind. Their lives moved along diverging paths.
This is hardly difficult or obscure. You may not recognize "Cyrano", a reference to Edmund Rostand's play Cyrano de Bergerac (also a film starring Gerard Depardieu), but you can slide past that without much of a stumble. The only thing that might seem odd is that the punchline is in the middle of the paragraph, not at the end. Rushdie is often hilarious, and a certain low-level amusement quivers in every sentence of his work, but the laughs are never the goal. Rushdie is working to a larger purpose. Our laughs are the masonry of the edifice he is slowly, patiently building in our minds.
Let's try another example. In a later scene, Aurora is trapped in her Buick amid a mob of angry workers near the docks of Bombay. She tries going forward, then tries backing up, then decides to go forward again. With each movement, to her rising alarm, she feels a bump. Finally, "barely feeling the fourth bump", she lurches back and stalls. She has run over the same man four times, severing his leg. Leave it to Salman Rushdie to describe such a grisly accident in a way that will leave any remotely sentient reader choking with affectionate laughter. But again, the laugh is woven into the story, and the story moves on. After getting the wounded worker to a surgeon, Aurora decides that the legless man would make a good pirate. So she acquires a brooding parrot for his shoulder, christens him Lambajan Chandiwala (which sort of means "Long John Silver" half in Hindi, half in English -- a typical Rushdie game) and keeps him around her household, where he plays various crucial parts throughout the book.
You get the idea. Being maimed is not a laughing matter, per se, but in a world as grim and treacherous as Rushdie's, laughter can the only viable form of weeping, because the crowded, high-speed, screaming world won't stop to let anybody mourn. Faced with this onrushing of life, Rushdie's anxious heroes festoon their days with multifaceted jokes. Aurora, a budding artist, takes a casual, neglectful, and yet possessive attitude toward her four children -- to the point that she gives them names that sound very much like "Eeny," "Meeny," "Mynie," and "Moe." This silliness hangs over the children's lives, as names do. It's still there, and still funny, even as we watch the ravages that follow from it.
As with most postmodern authors, don't expect Rushdie to offer suspense. Conventional suspense narrative offers a series of surprises that the reader and the hero both experience at the same time. Instead, this novel begins by announcing how it ends, and every major event in the book is endlessly previewed long before it occurs. The effect, of course, is that we focus not on what happens, or even why, but how. And if you get inside this novel, this alienating style can leave you feeling closer to the characters, more in-the-moment with the events described, than you'd ever be in a more conventional narrative style.
But what is this book about, you ask? Long story. Read the book. Actually, I'll start it for you. The hero, Aurora's son, has rushed through life at twice the normal speed, so that he is now mentally in his thirties but has the body of an old man. (Magic realism, you might call this, if you like labels.) He is writing this novel, page by page, and nailing each page to a different door or tree, as he rushes through the woods, fleeing his final captors.
(Rushdie's swerving sentences are always a wild ride, so fasten your seat belt. Ready? Here we go. The first page.)
I have lost count of the days that have past since I fled the horrors of Vasco Miranda's mad fortress in the Andalusian mountain village of Benengeli; ran from death under cover of darkness and left a message nailed to the door. And since then along my hungry, heat-hazed way there have been further bunches of scribbled sheets, swings of the hammer, sharp exclamations of two-inch nails ... On the run, I have turned the world into my pirate map, complete with clues, leading X-marks-the-spottily to the treasure of myself. When my pursuers have followed the trail they'll find me waiting, uncomplaining, out of breath, ready. Here I stand. Couldn't have done it differently.
(Here I sit, is more like it, in this dark wood -- that is upon this mount of olives, within this clump of trees, observed by the quizzically tilting stone crosses of a small, overgrown graveyard, and a little down the track from the Ultimo Suspiro gas station -- without benefit or need of Virgils, in what ought to be the middle pathway of my life, but has become, for complicated reasons, the end of the road, I bloody well collapse with exhaustion.)
(Footnotes if you need them: The nailing-to-doors is a reference to Martin Luther's posting of his "theses" on the doors of the Church, triggering the Protestant Reformation. The dark wood, the "middle pathway of my life", and the Virgils all refer to the opening of Dante's Inferno. Ultimo Suspiro is Spanish for "last gasp" or perhaps "last sigh." But again, you followed this well enough, right, whether or not you knew those things? Keep reading; you'll be fine.)
By the time you reach the end of this book, which is also the beginning, everything connects so tightly to everything else that the whole story feels timeless. Your laughs (which are perhaps tears that never had time to form) have glued its pieces together. In this compact whole, every laugh is a cry, every comedy a tragedy, every triumph a disaster, and each event turns inward on itself like a fractal, a rose, a sigh.
Time Magazine s Best Book of the Year Booker Prize-winning author Salman Rushdie combines a ferociously witty family saga with a surreally imagined an...More at Buy.com Marketplaces
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