The Moor's Last Sigh is written in the tradition of the great nineteenth-century novels that combined the fate of a family with the flow of a nation's history. Rushdie makes this explicit by including a diagram of the Da Gama/Zogoiby Family Tree before the Contents page, and then, as Coetzee points out, beginning the novel with the "dynastic prelude" that establishes the characters, directions, source of income and general attitudes of Moraes's forebears. The plurality of this family history is crucial because there is a clash of ideas and positions from the start. The narrative begins in Cochin (now Kerala) as this is the place where the West (Europe) and the East (the Indian Subcontinent) first interacted, and it is the location of the spice trade which led to the relative affluence of the Da Gama line. Rushdie equates pepper with passion (especially in the rush of love the overcomes Abraham Zogoiby and Aurora Da Gama), and draws a distinction between the origins of both love and material success in the realm of a natural resource, and their corruption in the realms of commerce and politics, areas that are debased by their removal from the natural world. Moraes's family is torn by more than the gulf between an agricultural economy and the techno-financial manipulations of the modern world, however. Differences in temperament, demeanor, and desire stem from a more personal, internal matrix of motives that supersede the changes in the social milieu but remain linked to it. The understandable rivalry of separate families forced together by a marriage is compounded by the inner conflicts assailing the main characters.
This is something of an abstraction, but it is a revealing indication of how Rushdie approached the main themes of the book: The tangle of emotional responses to a country as a kind of home; the clash of positive and negative feelings engendered by a difficult relationship with a heterogeneous family, particularly the problems of dealing with a powerful, controlling father; the ways in which a creative imagination—here expressed through an exhibition of the myriad delights of language and the revelatory capacity of painting—can provide both insight and consolation as the loss of home leads to perpetual migration; and as Rushdie's response to the interviewer indicates, the force of love in the course of human affairs, perhaps the most primal energy source in the cosmos as Rushdie sees it.
The Moor's Last Sigh, which Rushdie spent five years writing, follows the life of Moraes ("Moor") Zogoiby from his birth in 1957 to the "present" in the mid-1990s, preceded by what J. W. Coetzee calls "a dynastic prelude" reaching back to the birth of Moraes's great-grandfather, Francisco da Gama (1876), who began the spice trade in the province of Cochin that led to the family's rise to moderate affluence. Da Gama is a social progressive and Indian nationalist whose differences with his wife Epifania Menezes—a traditionalist described as believing in "England, God, philistinism, the old ways"—sets the terms of a schism that eventually splits the family and which parallels the divisions in the country at large. Their son Camoens has a vision of an independent India which he hopes will be "above religion because secular, above class because socialist, above caste because enlightened." Rushdie's knowledge of history and his personal experiences as an inhabitant of India, Pakistan, and the United Kingdom prevent him from sharing this idealistic conception, but Rushdie's social vision includes, as Moraes puts it in describing some of the paintings of his mother Aurora Da Gama, "a romantic myth of the plural, hybrid nation."
A ferociously witty family saga with a surreal imagination and sometimes blasphemous chronicle of modern India with peppery soliloquies on art, ethnicity, religious fanaticism, and the terrifying power of love. Moraes “Moor” Zogoiby, the last surviving scion of a dynasty of Cochinese spice merchants and crime lords, is also a compulsive storyteller and an exile. As he travels a route that takes him from India to Spain, he leaves behind a tale of mad passions and volcanic family hatreds, of titanic matriarchs and their mesmerized offspring, of premature deaths and curses that strike beyond the grave.
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